


Like Lightning

by artemisyd



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Anarchy, Angst, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, Misunderstandings, Slow Build Castiel/Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, Violence, dystopian au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 16:26:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 74,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1394362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artemisyd/pseuds/artemisyd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a war devastated a majority of the land and its cities, Aether was built; a shining blue city of progress, luxury, and exclusivity.  The few people who straggled in from the wasteland made it to the outskirts of Aether only to be met by a mighty electric fence.  Now, a colossal divide gapes between the filth of Dreck valley and the extravagant city of lights.</p>
<p>When Dean Winchester, a sweet talker who is both clever enough to sneak past the fences and charming enough to con his way into the beds of the wealthy, meets Castiel, a lethally trained Sentry charged with the protection of Aether, they are forced to decide between opposing loyalties.  Neither expects their alliance to challenge both the brave new world and the old one of ashes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Furious and Fleeting

“But he who says light does not necessarily say joy. There is suffering in the light; in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius.” -Victor Hugo

 

“Sam, wake up.”

Dean shuffled around the room, squinting through the dark to find his boots. The only light source was the thin slice of moonlight dripping through the slats in the wood nailed over the windows. “Sam! Up and at ‘em, the storm’s moving in,” he says irritably. A flash of lightning illuminates the room just long enough for him to see his scuffed up shoes peeking out from under the bed. His brother Sam is just stirring on the other side of the wooden bookcase that divides their respective sides of the room.

“S’posed to be a big one tonight,” Sam says, and Dean hums a confirming response. They’d been talking about this storm, predicting its power, tracking its development all week. They all knew it would be a big storm, no one needed reminding of that, but the way Sam said it wasn’t a reminder; what he meant was, “are you sure you want to do this?” 

Dean learned long ago not to exclude his little brother from the more risky activities he planned. Sammy had only tried to prove himself worthy without Dean’s supervision and gotten himself into danger multiple times when they were younger. Dean finally gave in and taught him everything he knew about tracking storms, conducting electricity to short circuit the fences around the city, how to sneak in and pretend to be a citizen of Aether, how to steal discretely, how to get back out into the valley all while avoiding being caught by the Sentry and imprisoned or whatever it was that happened when you were caught – no one was around to tell. Sam turned out to be very proficient and useful on missions, but that was never Dean’s concern. He’d never been able to tell Sam that he wasn’t underestimating his abilities. He was protecting him.

Dean was strapping on his belt of weapons and tools, most of which he designed himself, but some were old-fashioned guns that still use lead bullets, still kick back against your wrist when they’re fired. He clipped his Audium behind his ear; this, he also designed himself, although he didn’t have the resources to make it as functional as the ones that citizens of Aether had. He couldn’t play games and take pictures and talk to it, but its purpose was to alert him when he got near a member of the Sentry. Dean thought all of these fancy schmancy names for things were absurd, and he realized from a young age that they were just another barrier between his world and the glowing blue city beyond the fences. He and Sam had grown up in the valley outside of the city called the Dreck, and until Dean snuck into Aether for the first time, he didn’t understand the grotesque differences between these two places that were so close together. 

 

Five Years Earlier  
He was nineteen years old and the mission was simply to get in and familiarize himself with the city and the way of life. He wasn’t allowed to steal or con anyone on this mission, it was too risky and he was too inexperienced. If Dean was honest, he was just bright eyed and excited to see the city, assuming the citizens were just like him except that they lived in shiny blue things. Crowley, the leader of the underground Anarchist compound in the Dreck, gave him clothing that could pass as typical in Aether (Dean thought he looked absurd) and taught him all the lingo he would need to know to navigate the city and coalesce. It felt like traveling to a new planet, although it was only a few vertical miles away, on the other side of a few mountains.

After roaming Aether for hours and eaves dropping on conversations, he found himself in what he could only describe as a bar. It was far different from the bar in the Dreck; luxurious upholstery on the seats, glass walls all around, and not only did they have electricity, but an abundance of it. Everything was lit up with artificial light: the glasses from which patrons drank, the menus you could touch to see in-depth descriptions of food he had never even heard of before, the doors that slid open for customers without a touch. He fought his facial expression the entire time, trying to keep his jaw from falling open or his eyes from bugging out of his head. It was all very fascinating then. Eventually, a woman named Rhonda Hurley approached him and took him home, something he was advised to accept for the opportunity to see inside an Aether citizen’s home, and potentially even spend the night. He did, of course. To Dean’s relief, he found that the women weren’t any more difficult to charm in Aether than in the valley and he enjoyed his first evening lying his ass off about his life and identity. It was easy really. He just described the life he wished he had. He’d been enthusiastic then, excited to return and tell Sammy all about the gleaming city (although he’d spare him the details of his escapades with Rhonda and the silky pink underwear she made him put on).

The next morning, Dean snuck some food in strange packages from Rhonda’s kitchen, which was enormous and entirely covered in stainless steel and marble, and skipped out through her giant glass doors, which reported to him on his way out, “weather: overcast, pollution advisory: low”. He glanced back at the doors as they slid closed and scoffed, unsurprised at this point since everything in her house could sense or talk or move. No one could ever be lonely when they had screens in every room through which an attractive person with a chipper voice talked at them all day.

He traipsed back towards the fence surrounding the city. It was impossible to get lost when downtown was a constant shining blue beacon and there were sleek trains on metal tracks heading into town from every which way. He took his time marveling at the height of the buildings and the cleanliness of it all. Standing at a corner near the outskirts of town, a few blocks away from the fence he would have to sneak back under, he turned back to the blue light of the city. And for the first time since he’d gotten in, he thought of the Dreck valley.  
His stomach began to burn with hunger too deep for food to satisfy. It was as if the Dreck, a filthy cohort of makeshift houses, didn’t exist to the citizens of Aether. No one mentioned it, and the valley wasn’t even visible from here save for a tiny trail of grey-brown smoke floating up over the mountains to the east. He, on the other hand, never spent a day of his life without at least once looking longingly at the tops of the skyscrapers of Aether. The few that were visible appeared to perch on the top of the mountains, boastful and taunting. Dean spent his days in the Salvage, a place that was once a junk yard for the Aether, but has since become a place where Drecks scavenge for any valuable metal or goods to trade in the markets. Aether sends massive cargo boxes of non-biodegradable garbage into the Salvage, labeling them as “second-hand donations”. They’re often times toxic remnants of old gadgets and stripped of anything useful. Empty promises. Only after today had he seen the fully functional devices from which these scraps came. Nearly every citizen had a small metallic plate attached behind their ear, sleek designs, some more bubbly and colorful, some simple. They mulled around in a rushed manner, occasionally mumbling into their Audiums. Dean had noticed that there were groups of people speaking to one another, but not listening. He heard the words and phrases from mouths that matched the ones he heard from Rhonda’s little talking screens. People were regurgitating news, weather, current events, nodding, repeating, but not listening. He thought then how like the trains they were, following invisible tracks.

Dean was pulled back from his tangent thoughts by two hands on his chest wrapped from behind him. He tried to poise himself for an attack, but as he was yanked backward, a huge mass of metal hurtled past him just inches in front of his face. He felt his back collide with a solid chest, but when he turned to see who had just saved him from being pummeled by a train, he only saw a man in a black and silver uniform stalking away from him. He ran after the man and grabbed his wrist.

“Hey man. Thank you.”

The man said nothing, made a face of acknowledgement at Dean with his eyes and mouth both down turned, and continued to walk.

“Wait up!” Dean took another few steps to catch him again, “Who are you?”

The man looked exasperated, and when he finally raised his eyes to look at Dean, his face was stern and his left eye was eerily blue. Glowing, in fact, much like the city itself. 

“Castiel,” he spoke in a voice like the gravel beneath Dean’s boots when he walked through the Salvage. Gritty and monotone. His eyes raked Dean’s face.

“Uh… What are you?” Dean asked, still mesmerized by Castiel’s eyes. The color of his irises was a stormy deep blue, but a small light attached to a device behind his ear illuminated the left one. As he leaned in closer, curiously, he saw a miniature image projected onto his cornea. 

Castiel’s head craned sideways and his brows pinched together, his eyes squinting with suspicion. “I am a Sentry.”

Dean took a step back and lowered his eyes. He was informed to avoid Sentries at all costs because they had Audiums that had facial recognition technology and they would know if he wasn’t a citizen of Aether. That must be the purpose of the light shone on his left eye as well as the smolder he was giving Dean now.  
Dean turned on his heel and began walking away briskly with his head down. He wouldn’t cause a scene, he thought to himself, he would break the man’s neck with one swift move and leave him on the tracks so it would appear to have been an accident. He checked his surroundings for any onlookers. This part of town was vacant in the awkward span between breakfast and lunch. He knew there was surveillance galore, but if it looked innocent enough, maybe they wouldn’t look into it. Luckily, he thought, the Sentry wouldn’t make a scene either; they would always feign to be peaceful guards of a peaceful city. Dean knew this because the few times Sentry came to the Dreck valley, people didn’t die; they vanished.

He swung his upper body around, preparing himself for what he had to do. Castiel, however, still stood on the corner of the street staring after him but not pursuing. It was such a peculiar occurrence that he didn’t follow or mention Dean’s identity. He faltered in his steps and turned fully to stare back – he couldn’t resist the curiosity – just as another bullet train passed between him and where the man stood stationary. When the train ended, the street corner was deserted. Dean could feel adrenaline buzzing in his veins, his body unable to register that he didn’t get caught, his mind unable to rationalize why not.  
Castiel was like lightning, furious and fleeting, and just like someone who’d been struck, the back of Dean’s eyelids were burned with that smoldering blue. He’d made it back to the Dreck safely that evening but Castiel’s expression was florid in his mind well into the following days.

 

Five Years Later  
Sam and Dean had finally suited up properly and stepped out into the night, glancing up at the cumulus clouds. Despite the lack of light, the telltale signs of a powerful storm were visible in the underside of the clouds. The gradient shadows swooping down and swirling ominously above them gave Dean the feeling of being sucked beneath a tide and looking up at the raging waves from the calmer water beneath. This was what he lived for, and what he could very well die for. Footsteps sloshed through the mud in the distance, and through the drizzle came Jo. She had started to tag along shortly after her father died in an accident involving this very thing; it seemed like a maladaptive coping mechanism, but he was in no place to judge her for that. He could understand that by learning storm patterns and how to rewire the electric fences around Aether without being fried, she was preserving her father or finding parts of him she didn’t know. Still, Dean felt protective of Jo, although he never let it show – she was proud and defensive just like him – he didn’t relish the idea of her putting herself in danger any more than Sammy.  
Jo greeted Dean with an elbow to his ribs and a half smile that didn’t reach her eyes. They were all three nervous and it was as tangible in the space between them as the static current just before a strike.

A silent flash illuminated the sky just long enough for him to locate the cloud carrying it, and then a clap of thunder followed seven seconds later. They needed to hurry to make it to the fence outside of Aether in time. They began walking along the old tracks that carried cargo to and from Aether and hopped on the rusty freight car as it passed them in the last few miles of their trek. Along the way, Sam had taken it upon himself – more out of nervousness than lack of preparation – to rehearse every technique, escape route, every possible scenario. The only one he didn’t mention in his perpetual rambling was getting caught. It was an oath agreed upon amongst the three of them that if someone got caught, they’d keep moving. No man left behind was not something they could afford; it would only get all of them incarcerated, and because no one knew what exactly that meant, they equated it with death. Each of them agreed that if they got caught, they would try to fight and distract as much as possible for the other two to escape. In his gut, Dean always knew that he wouldn’t be able to leave Sammy behind, but he didn’t need to mention that. It was only emergency protocol, anyways.

He leapt, practiced, from the back of the train car and watched Sam and Jo do the same. Their presence always twisted his stomach uncomfortably. They were both adults and they both hated being babied, but they were his responsibility. Their safety would always be in his hands. Jo’s father died when she was young and her mother Ellen was a busy woman. When they’d go play outside together as children, Dean would always be on the receiving end of a very pointed glare from Ellen – you watch after those kids, it said. And since even before that, since his mother died when he was four years old, Sammy was his to raise and care for. His father checked out, became heavily involved in the black markets and if he hadn’t disappeared a few years back he might have died of liver failure by now. His brother’s presence is both a relief and a burden to Dean; not that anything Sam ever needed from him was burdensome. He was happy if Sam was happy. But the constant anxiety that Sam could be hurt doing something Dean had taught him how to do left Dean sleepless so many nights. One wrong wire, one slip of the hand and he could fry like Jo’s dad. One wrong word, one slip of the tongue, and he could disappear like their own father. 

Dean looked around the base of the mountain chain where they now stood at the outer gates of Aether. Massive transformers stood with fans posted at the tops that blew outwards. The first time Dean asked about their purpose, his father’s jaw clenched and now he finds himself doing the same whenever he sees them. They’re filters. They blow impurities out of Aether, just like the waterlines that run beneath the city sputter out all their sludge in the valley. Of all the times Dean had snuck in and out of Aether, he’d never heard the voices say “pollution advisory: high”. He doubted he ever would. The fans, the tunnels, the ugly electric metals fences, they were all hidden to the east of Aether, just like the Dreck was. They were all emblems of their ignorance. Sometimes he’d hear a citizen of Aether, in passing, talk about the past. About the war, and how we’d won and how they couldn’t believe anyone used to do such horrible things. Many times, Dean fought the urge to grip their shoulders and shake them, but he knew he couldn’t rattle sense into a senseless brain, and it would only get himself caught.

A sharp clap of thunder echoed off the mountainside and Dean pushed his vendettas from his mind and focused on their task. He attached a thin but sturdy wire to his belt began his ascent up the transformer tower.  
Two things would happen if he got this done right.  
First, they could harness enough electricity to power their generator for a few days. Dean had made it from old car batteries and different supplies he’d manage to scavenge in the Salvage. Any specialty parts he needed, he’d sneak out of Aether on one of his trips. It took him a while to figure out how to harness power from a lightning strike, but once he built the right battery, it was the best source of electricity available. Second, the power to the fence would be cut long enough for him to get into Aether and back out before maintenance came and reset it. It helped to have a lightning storm to blame for power outages, but in the five years that Dean had been sneaking in and out of Aether, the security had increased significantly. Different types of fencing and lots more reinforcement were used. It could be new technology for more efficient power, but it also made it harder and far more dangerous to get in.

When Dean made it to the top of the transformer, cringing each time the sky lit up (endless algorithms worked out by Sam told him the best probability for survival, but nature did not lend itself to probability), he unraveled the wire at his belt and extended it up from the top of the tower.  
“Approximately three minutes, Dean!” Sam shouted from the ground as Dean began to shimmy back down with his nerves singing in his veins. One slip of the hand, one wrong number in an equation, one anomaly in weather patterns.

It happened when Dean was two thirds of the way back down. Jo screamed, “Dean!” but an impossibly loud siren wailed over whatever her next words may have been. Dean looked around frantically. One slip of the hand, and he landed on his back in the mud. He and Sam scrambled for one another, checking that they were okay. Other than seeing stars from the fall, Dean was fine. The sirens were deafening. He had never heard them before and he glanced around to find a cause. He was spinning in the mud, dazed, searching for Jo when he saw her through the darkness and pelting rain. She was face down in the mud with a man in a black suit shoving a knee between her shoulder blades and pulling her arms behind her back.

Dean tried to sprint towards her, but his boots were suctioned into the mud. Jo didn’t appear to be fighting anymore and Dean’s stomach lurched up into this throat. This couldn’t be it. Not Jo. Please not Jo. But she was on her feet now with the Sentry behind her marching her through a gate where some other Sentry were coming through. If he was going to get Sammy out of here, his window was closing fast. If he ran after Jo, Sam would follow and he couldn’t risk Sam being caught as well. He turned and grabbed Sam’s shoulders and shoved him mouthing “go go go!” over the screaming sirens. He turned to check the proximity of the Sentries to calculate what it would take to fight them off of Jo. He noticed that the transformers were sparking and rattling on their towers. The ground beneath his feet buzzed with the raw energy of the storm they had been anticipating for days. They knew it might have unprecedented power. It was ideal for them, then. Now it was nothing but impending danger. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since Sam had warned him that he had three minutes until the big strike, but it seemed overdue. 

A Sentry was running towards them, somehow managing to evade the sinking mud. The rest were on the other side of the fence, wrestling Jo. He saw one pull out a taze gun and he shouted in vain through the deafening noise. He watched her body spasm and fall limp. He couldn’t let his knees go weak now. He had to get Sam out.  
He yanked his feet from his shoes where they were hopelessly stuck in mud and began to run through puddles to where Sam stood with his jaw hanging open in horror. He tried to yank Sam’s arm in the direction they needed to run when Sam slipped and his knees squashed down into the mud. When Dean turned to retrieve him, his heart stammered painfully and he felt bile burn his throat. When he’d fallen from the tower, the wire came down with him. He hadn’t even noticed. It was tangled at the base of the transformer and snaked through the muddy water right near where Sam was sprawled. The Sentry that had been trudging after them before was stopped right behind Sam. His face was streaked with mud and he seemed to be noticing the wire as well. He wasn’t attacking, seeming more intent on getting himself out of harm’s way, so Dean focused on keeping Sam alive.  
Dean hooked his wrists under Sam’s armpits and tried to pull him away from the wire and onto dryer, more elevated land. When Sam got a handful of grass a few yards away, he towed himself out the rest of the way and got his feet beneath him again. 

It was so dark and the rain came down in sheets shrouding anything more than a few inches away in a grey haze. Before he could run, lightning struck a tower and he saw a transformer explode in a massive shower of sparks and smoke. Then the next one, even closer. When it hit the one nearest them that wire would turn everything it touched, and everything the water in which it laid touched, to smithereens. The Sentry, standing in the center of the puddle, was included in that, he thought thankfully. The others had run for cover on the other side of the fence, and Dean was relieved that this one would die before he had to fight him off. He gave Sam one last shove to out (as far from the gathering water as possible) and down (as close to the ground as possible). Then an even bigger flash came. In the microseconds before the impact, he admired the storm as he always had, for its sheer inconceivable, immeasurable force. The wind was knocked out of him and he felt a searing pain on his shoulder. He heard the sirens punch out one last wail and fade to silence as they lost power, and his vision failed as his head hit the ground for the second time that night. He saw nothing but bright burning blue behind his eyelids.


	2. Catsuit and Combat Boots

Castiel loved lightning storms, especially if they occurred late at night so that he could retreat to his room at the top of the Garrison and watch the sky illuminate through the domed windows. Despite the million tiny sounds of rain tapping the windowpanes and the low rumbles of thunder, the air was thick and humid and full of great silence. Blissful silence. Some Sentry preferred to spend the time they had off guard listening to music or watching entertainment programs on their Audiums or to socialize with one another, but Castiel preferred quiet. He tended not to partake in social pastimes, not because of displeasure in their company but because of an even greater pleasure in solitude. He liked to trace the lines of raindrops down the glass. He liked to watch the sky change colors over the mountain range to the east, watch the storm slide in with low silver clouds like fingers raking through the valleys. The top floor of the Garrison headquarters was the only point in the city from which one could view the Dreck valley. In daylight and clear weather conditions, the piles of trash and stacks of dirty smoke were visible, the haze that lingered over the clumps of factories, and the holes in the roofs of slum houses. But at night, the east was beautiful. The dark green hills were spotted with dim golden firelight, not the obscenely bright blue artificial light that shined throughout the city. The darkness shrouded the ugly truth of the land beyond the fences.

It brought Castiel a strange combination of guilt and calm to look over the Dreck valley. He never wanted to visit, because being sent there meant doing harm to one of them, and he’d always harbored more curiosity than hostility towards Dreck. But he wished he could see it up close without being given orders to track down a rebel or resistor and incarcerate them. Asking about their way of life would indicate doubt and defection to the others so he kept his interest concealed. Castiel’s eyes were losing focus of the landscape to the east and instead becoming fascinated with the unpredictable patterns of the beads of rain on the other side of the thick glass panes. He put one hand up to the cool window and watched an outline of fog form around the heat of his skin. 

His Audium released a high pitched, urgent noise straight to his eardrum. He was off guard at the time, so to get a notification meant there was some sort of emergency he was being called to attend to. These things didn’t happen often, but when they did, a Sentry was expected to act very swiftly and with stealth. It was storming more violently than he realized as he descended the Garrison and stepped outside. His Audium, in correspondence with the control room, notified him that there was a disturbance and possible breach on outer tower fourteen. Off guard Sentries would be dispatched to unexpected situations as the ones on guard had to maintain their positions at their assigned posts. The outer fences didn’t have guards because they were so rarely breached. It was not a written law that those outside of Aether were not allowed in, and citizens were kept under the impression that any humans residing outside of Aether did so by choice and lived nomadic lifestyles and therefore had no interest in entering the city. However, being a Sentry, Castiel was trained to interrogate any unregistered human found in Aether city limits, and if he could help it, to keep them from ever entering in the first place. This had, since he’d first been told, left a sour stagnant puddle in his stomach. He had only ever run into an outsider once in his life and it was in his first official year of service as a Sentry of Aether. 

 

Five Years Earlier  
He had been sent out of the Garrison on a simple domestic task, paying visit to the home of one Rhonda Hurley who reported stolen property. Sentry were trained to be pleasant and peaceful towards and around citizens of the city, and if any other measures were required, they must be executed discretely and without a scene. On his walk back, Castiel took to the outskirts of the downtown area as he had been advised to be seen by as few people as possible; citizens are not comfortable with the presence of law enforcement in their leisure time. He hugged the eastern edge of the city, following the magnetic grid system of the bullet train back to the Garrison. After a few blocks, Castiel noticed a man standing about an inch from the silver divot in the pavement looking to the green hills in the east with a stony expression. He didn’t seem to be observing the train heading directly towards him at a lethal speed. Castiel lunged forward without thinking and wrapped his arms around the man’s body, pulling him back only a few inches and squeezing his eyes shut. It was just enough, and he felt the gust of air off the train’s slick metal sides sweep past his forearms. The force of it nearly knocked him down in the train’s wake. When it passed, Castiel became flushed and quickly dropped his arms to his sides and walked away stiffly.

He heard hurried footsteps approaching behind him and his heart stuttered. He hoped he wouldn’t be reprimanded for being seen by a citizen. A firm hand wrapped around his wrist and he swung around, irritated that the stranger would not leave him be. When his eyes made contact with the man, the first thing he noticed was the trail of bronzed freckles across the bridge of his nose. That was a rarity in Aether where overcast weather was common and many people did not utilize the outdoor community space allotted to them. The next things he registered were the viridescent green eyes and the sharp cupid’s bow of his upper lip. These observations were purged from Castiel’s mind when his Audium brought a red warning up that read “Unidentified”. Castiel’s brain shorted out, then. This man could be dangerous, savage – gorgeous – no, a hazard to public safety. He had, of course, been debriefed on what to do in this situation, but he never thought he’d actually come across an unregistered person.

The man gave Castiel some sort of gesture of gratitude, and Castiel replied, at least he thought he replied, but he cannot for the life of him remember what was said. He went through the protocol in his head but neglected to issue an Unregistered Person warning to headquarters. He stood catatonic and watched the man saunter away after what must have been a dismissal, he didn’t remember, and could not make himself execute the proper task. Another bullet train burst past him blowing air on his face and revitalized him. Before the train passed and the man was in his sight again, he ducked around the corner and walked hurriedly back to the Garrison. He hadn’t even asked the stranger for his name, but when he sat in the top dome of the building that evening, watching the sun cast gold streaks across the green hills in the distance, he thought of those eyes and his throat felt tight. His head told him it felt that way because he was a Sentry and he’d let an Unregistered Person get away from him. Something tightly wound behind his ribs told him he felt that way because he was Castiel and he’d let that human walk away from him.

 

Five Years Later  
He slid his combat boots into the moisture detractors as the tall glass doors slid closed behind him. He was sent out to the fence with Balthazar and Uriel and they flanked him as he approached the massive towers. The rain fell in thick sheets making it difficult to see, but his Audium activated the heat sensor and detected two silhouettes on the ground at the base of tower fourteen. Balthazar and Uriel picked up speed and rushed towards the dark figures; their job was to carry out this mission with zero citizen disturbance, meaning they would have to take the underground back to the Garrison after the capture. Castiel had never taken any prisoners and therefore had never been underground. Bile rose to the back of his throat as he picked up speed when he noticed a third figure descending the tower. As Uriel reached the fence, the smallest of the three unknowns rushed towards him and began swinging fists. 

The fence began to spark violently, and Castiel could feel the grid beneath his feet buzzing with the diverted power from the transformers. If lightning struck a tower right now, it would detonate. The other two, appearing to be men, were wading through the muddy ditch as Castiel approached them with far more ease due to his detractors on his boots. Mud splattered his face as rain pelted down and he felt like collapsing from the pressure. He was close enough then to grab hold of one of the perpetrators when he saw a shiny wire snaking through the mud, hooked up to a strange box, and tangled around the transformer. He knew his duty was to capture these people, but Balthazar and Uriel were already back on the other side of the fence with the girl and seemed to be running away clear of the impending explosion. They wouldn’t return for him. They weren’t trained to. 

He glanced over his shoulder, desperately mulling over his options, when he saw that a transformer had caught on fire. One blew. Then another. One man was dragging the other out of the puddle that Castiel still stood ankle-deep in. His suit would be able to deflect any burns to himself due to the combat material, but it wouldn’t protect him from the blast of the transformer closest to them, diffused through the wire in the water. When the flame sputtered and sparked, he threw himself onto the man nearest, unable to shield both of them with his body.

His eardrums were pierced with an unbearable timbre. His Audium had become disconnected and was malfunctioning and he was forced to rip it from behind his ear. His vision was spotty, and then black. A flash of sharp heat enveloped his body and if any debris hit him, he was numb to it.

 

X

 

Dean cracked his eyes again, unsure of how long they’d been shut. His head pounded and there was a dull burning sensation coming from some unidentified place on his arm. He was vaguely aware of a dead weight against his body and he tried to focus his vision to find Sam. 

“Sam? Sam!” he panicked, trying to lift his sore body from under the mass above him. His vision cleared just enough, though still bleary with mud and rainwater, to see that it was a human. A man in a Sentry uniform, unconscious, lay on top of him. The last thought he had before the explosion came back to him – the gratefulness that this Sentry would die – and he nearly hurled into the patch of grass beside him.

“I’m okay,” he heard Sam cough out and felt his hand grab onto Dean’s jacket sleeve.

Dean relaxed at hearing Sam’s voice. He shoved the man over and sat up, first and foremost checking for Jo and the other Sentries. They were nowhere to be found. 

“Damnit!” he yelled, slamming a closed fist into the ground. He’d lost Jo. She was gone, like his father. Only he knew exactly who had taken her, and that he’d never see her again. He’d seen how they treated her. His head spun and tears stung at his eyes. He would have to tell Ellen, and it would be the hardest thing he’d ever have to say. This was all on him, and if there was a way in all of heaven or hell that he could get Jo back, he’d do it.

The man in uniform flopped next to him began to twitch and make wincing sounds. Dean was flooded with an awkward mixture of relief and dread. The poor guy hadn’t died. Yet. But that only meant a few more moments of life before Dean had to gank the bastard himself. He’d do it to protect them, but he wouldn’t relish in it. A Sentry had once given him a chance that he didn’t deserve, and he’d never forgotten that favor.

“Hey,” Dean poked his side, “anybody home?”

The man made a sound of protest as he tried to push himself up and failed, his arms buckling beneath him. Dean had a thought that he might be able to interrogate the guy for a few hours about where they would have taken Jo and how they could get her back, but he wasn’t sure it would be possible even if they knew where to find her. Aether was very well protected and their military was more advanced than Dean knew how to deal with. Bringing this soldier back to Dreck might pose a greater risk to the entire community than if he offed him there and then. The Sentry finally cracked an eye, a look of complete resignation on his face, and Dean felt the blood in his veins freeze in place as a cold blue gaze met his.

“Son of a bitch,” murmured Dean under his breath, “I know you.”

“What?” Sam asked, still breathing with difficulty.

Dean said nothing, stunned.

“Cuh – Castiel, right?” Dean hadn’t actually ever forgotten the name.

Castiel seemed to suddenly find new life as he heaved himself up and gawked at Dean. The moment could have gone on for an hour, as far as Dean knew, just staring at one another in utter disbelief. Finally, Castiel glanced over his shoulder at his brother still lying beside him being suspiciously quiet and said, “is your friend alright?”

“Yeah, he’s – Sam? Sammy?” His brother had somehow lost consciousness in the span of time he’d been gaping at the strange man from his past and those impossible eyes. His hands fluttered all over Sam, checking for more severe wounds and he found that while Dean himself had been protected from the blast by Castiel’s body, Sam was exposed and had lacerations all over him. The most severe was a massive shard of metal from the battery box lodged in his lower back. 

Sam’s face was covered in a dewy sheen and he was going too pale. 

“No, no, Sam. You’re okay. You’re alright, we’re gonna get you home.”

He stood up, forgetting his mission to off the Sentry, not that he could bring himself to do it then anyways. He began hovering over Sam, trying to find the least painful way to drag him back to the train tracks.

Dean felt a firm hand on his shoulder and his eyes shot to Castiel with a plea in them. “I will help,” the soldier said.

Dean was in no position to deny help when he was desperate to get Sam to the hospital so he motioned for Castiel to lift Sam’s ankled and began to waddle up the hill towards the Dreck.

Their labored breathing didn’t allow for conversation on the way, and during the short train ride, Dean was occupied with ripping pieces of his t-shirt and sopping up Sam’s blood and sweat.

When they finally made it to the Dreck, the skyline was turning a light purple color and the storm had been reduced to a low rumble in the far off distance. They hauled Sam’s limp body into the rusty tin building that was the closest they had to a healthcare facility. A young nurse came to assist them as soon as they made it through the door and as she did initial checks on Sam’s vitals, she assured Dean that he still had a pulse and a strong chance of survival. A strong chance wasn’t good enough for Dean and he paced restlessly in the waiting area.

He finally caught his breath enough to remember the huge dilemma that Castiel the Sentry of Aether brought to the table. Dean looked at the man, really looked at him, for the first time since he woke up on the ground. He was covered in mud, his face grey-brown with streaks of his pale skin showing through. Castiel looked completely baffled, glancing up at the patch work of tin and aluminum and tarp across the ceiling. Dean realized that this man had been on top of him during the explosion, that Castiel had protected him from it, saved his life just as he had done five years prior, and that he could very well have wounds just as severe as Sam’s.

Dean cleared his throat before saying, “you okay?”

Castiel was a deer in headlights, as if he didn’t know where he was or how he got here. He looked at his hands, turning them over slowly. They were both gloved with the same material as his suit.

“My suit protected me for electrocution and burns. My injuries appear to be minor,” Castiel finally spoke. His voice, somehow, was even richer than Dean remembered it. The Sentry’s eyes raked Dean over and he shifted uncomfortably. “Your shoulder, let me – “

Dean sucked a sharp breath through his teeth when Castiel touched his left shoulder. He hadn’t noticed anything but a dull pain before, but he looked down and the fabric of his jacket was charred and sticking to a bubbly burn mark.

“I will request a vile of Expoticum,” Castiel said as he began to stand.

“You huh?”

“Exp – you…You do not have a universal healing ointment?”

“Does this place look like its stocked up with your fancy mojo crap?”

Castiel’s face fell and he looked profoundly disturbed that humans outside of his little heaven had to actually suffer and heal the hard way.  
“I am sorry. I would retrieve some from Aether, but I will be presumed dead and I’m not sure I would be welcomed back, having failed my mission,” Castiel said. His words were enunciated like the voices on the screens in Aether, but not nearly as perky.

Dean only scoffed in response and peeled his jacket from his arm, gritting his teeth against the sting of the air hitting his burn. It almost looked the shape of a very thin hand. When Castiel saw it, he gasped and lifted his own hand. His suit was a sleek black material with a layered texture, almost like slicked down feathers. Along his forearms and the palms of his hands there were thin strips of metal.

“The suit only protects what’s inside. I might have activated a taze when I fell, or perhaps the metal conducted the shock to your arm.” Castiel looked betrayed by his gear.

The nurse came back into the room and kneeled beside Dean.  
“Your brother has stabilized. He’s being treated with the strongest painkillers we have access to right now, but he’ll need a lot of rest. Is it okay if we keep him for a few nights?” she asked in her most pleasant I’m-sorry-your-loved-one-almost-died voice.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, can you just let me know as soon as he wakes up?”

“Of course. My name is Jessica Moore and I’ll be his healer. Let me know if you have any other concerns,” she said before she left them with a soothing smile.

 

Suddenly, Dean had no clue what to do with himself. His brother was stable but knocked out on meds for a while and he was in the middle of slum-town with a homeless Sentry, for Christ’s sake. He’d have to pay Ellen a visit soon. Out of respect for her, he needed to do it as quickly as possible, but it wasn’t like he could let a Sentry tag along when he informed her that Sentries had jumped her daughter. He couldn’t return to Aether, and Dean wasn’t sure if he could allow him to even if he could. This man did him a favor five years ago, but that didn’t mean he could trust him now. Dean put his palm to his face and rubbed at his tired eyes and grainy skin.

“So… Cas… Your place or mine?” he joked, trying to lighten the mood. Bad call. Apparently the guy couldn’t take jokes.

“My name is Castiel. And I cannot – “

“Yeah, yeah, I was kidding. You can crash in my cabin, looks like I’ll have an extra bed tonight. We’ll sort it out tomorrow.” He knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep with a Sentry in his house, but he didn’t want to let on that he was paranoid. He owed this man some sort of debt, and he knew that, but he was still extremely apprehensive. He couldn't let his mind dwell on the fact that he was bringing home the enemy. He couldn't let himself reflect on anything that had happened that day, or his mind would self-destruct.

 

Back at the pile of wood he called home, he pointed Cas to his bed for the night and gave him some clothes to sleep in. The dude actually had the audacity to ask if he could shower, and that got under Dean’s skin. First the expo-whatever miracle healing cream, and now he wanted warm, running water sprayed on his spoiled little ass? Of course, Castiel’s face was one of heartbreak and sympathy rather than anger when Dean explained that he had to boil collected rainwater and fill the old porcelain tub with it, so Dean couldn’t stay mad.

When Cas came out of the little partitioned nook that serves as the bathroom, his hair was damp and the mud was mostly gone from his skin. Wearing Dean’s too-big sleep clothes, he didn’t look nearly as threatening as he did in his catsuit and combat boots. Dean marveled at how pale and soft his skin looked, but he guessed the dude had never stepped foot outside without his head-to-toe black get-up. Still, his skin nearly looked like a marble statue and that couldn’t have been normal.

“Thank you, um…” Castiel’s face scrunched in horror as if he’d just been caught with his pants down. “I don’t know your name.”

Dean chuckled and realized, after the serendipity of meeting twice, he probably should have introduced himself.  
“Dean Winchester.”

“Dean,” Cas repeated as if he was trying out the name. “Dean Winchester, I realize this situation is atypical and uneasy. I should not be here, but I can’t… I don’t think I can return to Aether. Considering the night we’ve had, I greatly appreciate you allowing me to stay here. I trust that you won’t attempt to kill me while I sleep. Tomorrow, I will ruminate on my options and be promptly out of your way.”

Castiel gave his schpeel with a ramrod straight spine, looking straight at Dean and standing far too close for a typical social exchange. He spoke like he was reciting the words from a card. At first, Dean was uncomfortable, but as Cas rambled on with his robot-speak, Dean’s smile grew.

“No problem, Cas. I’m not gonna kill you. I owe you my life twice, you know.”

“It’s Castiel.”

And that was the end of it. Cas’ breathing slowly evened out and Dean was struck by how strange it was for such a well disciplined little solider to be in such a vulnerable state right here in front of Dean. He must have been exhausted to let his guard slip that low. Dean wouldn’t admit to himself that he was worn out as well, and he fought the sting in his eyes. He did everything he could to evade thinking of confronting Ellen, and focused on what he’d do with Cas tomorrow while he dealt with his mess.

He wanted to believe that he couldn’t trust Castiel. But Cas had trusted him. He wanted to believe that he could get information from him that he needed to save Jo, and then get rid of him. But he had saved his life twice now, and even Dean’s steel heart couldn’t justify a betrayal like that. He wanted to believe that he wasn’t watching over Castiel as he slept, that he was just waiting. But this man was stern and clinical and a highly-trained lethal weapon yet sacrificed himself and his position as a Sentry for a complete stranger on two separate occasions, and damn it all to hell, Dean was intrigued. He was intrigued by the strategies of the soldier with the hard-set jaw, not the soft planes of untouched skin that rose and fell beneath Sam’s tattered quilt. He was intrigued by the knowledge of Aether military tactics in his head, not the raven black hair that stuck to his forehead and the nape of his neck as it dried. Dean created a mantra in his mind to distract him hour after sluggish hour; I’m not strong enough. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t fast enough. I should have tried harder. I’m so sorry. He alternated apologizing to Jo, apologizing to Ellen, apologizing to Sammy, and hating himself for the next few hours as the sky lightened to a pale blue-grey that cut thin lines through the dark wooden floorboards.


	3. Baby in a Trench Coat

Dean woke to a peal of laughter outside of his window. It was well into morning and the town was buzzing to life. He’d just rested his chin in his hand for one minute and the next thing he knew there was drool down his forearm. It hadn’t been a restful nap, just a blink. He immediately searched the dim room to make sure Castiel was still dozing on Sam’s bed… and he wasn’t.

He must have been one stealthy son of a bitch to get out without Dean seeing or hearing him. He checked all of the little nooks of the room to make sure and then slipped his gun in his waistband before booking it out the door. Depending on how long Cas had been gone, he might have already made it back to Aether. This might have all been a ruse and he was heading back to his posse with information or names or something. What he could possibly have accomplished spending a night in Dean’s house, he has no clue. But his stomach soured at the thought that if he saw Castiel, he’d have to put him down. Dean had almost no chance fighting him into submission with Castiel’s military training and combat skills, not to mention who-knows-what-kind of weapons hidden all up in that skin tight suit. He’d have to shoot on sight, and he clung to the tiny hope that he wouldn’t find him at all.

Dean jogged down the dusty path through the center of town, dodging children and weaving around people pushing carts full of vegetables or textiles or animal pelts. He’d almost reached the outer edge of the Salvage where the train tracks began when he saw a head of dark hair mussed in the most unassuming and unkempt way. The figure wore a long tan trench coat but beneath it, those tell-tale black boots. Dean’s steps halted and his jaw fell open. Cas, awkward, stiff, literal Castiel had his back to Dean and was standing directly in front of a hooker – they loitered around the Salvage luring in anyone with spare change like sirens. From what he could see of her face, she was immensely entertained. After his heart rate slowed, Dean crossed his arms and stood back, still unannounced, to watch the scene unfold.

She leaned on one hip and swayed her shoulders back and forth, twirling a blonde curl around her finger. Her scant white dress was grubby with the dry dirt of the valley and one strap had slipped off her sun burnt shoulder. Maybe Cas was a sweet talker after all. And then he watched her face drop, rage consuming the seductive veneer, and her dainty little hand swept across Castiel’s cheek with an audible thwack. Dean winced and jumped the few steps between them, intervening with a hand on Cas’ elbow.

“Woah, okay, buddy let’s just –“

The girl, no older than Sammy’s age now that he stood close enough to see the thick line of charcoal beneath her eyes and the smeared orange rouge on her cheeks, was running away holding her face in her hands.

Castiel turned, surprised to find Dean, and looked both shocked and clueless.

“The hell did you say to her?” Dean asked, trying to stifle his laughter.

“I – nothing… She asked me if I wanted a ‘good time’ and then she called me ‘daddy’, and I informed her that I was certainly not her father and asked if he had gone missing.” His face was one of utter concern, and he actually used air quotes.

Dean nearly doubled over laughing before he remembered that, a few minutes ago, he was planning on killing the man standing in front of him. He cleared his throat and tried to recompose himself.

“I thought I was gonna have to hunt you.”

Castiel only stared back, serious as ever.

“How’d you slip out so quietly? And what on earth is this?” he plucked at a loose thread on the trench coat.

“I am trained to be unseen and unheard. It was not difficult.” Cas glanced down at his new ensemble and shrugged. “I shouldn’t be seen here as a Sentry without a task, it will be suspicious, so I thought a disguise was in order.”

“Of all things, this is what you picked? You could have asked me if you needed a shopping partner.” Did Dean seriously just say that?

“It would have been unwise for you to accompany me while still in uniform. I am aware that Sentries are not taken to kindly here and I did not want to impart that scrutiny to you.”  
The airy mood, once again, deflated and plopped over.

“You could have borrowed some clothes, you know,” Dean said. “Hey, how’d you pay for that, anyway?”

Castiel took a deep breath, as if explaining himself was exhausting. “I traded one of my moisture detractors. They won’t function here without the grid beneath the soil but they are made of silver.” Dean looked down at Cas’ boots again, impressed at his resourcefulness.

“Your hospitality was greatly appreciated, but my presence may be a risk to you. I ruminated my options, as I said, and have come to the conclusion that my departure would be in everyone’s best interest.”

“Departure? As in, back to LaLaLand?” Dean asked defensively.

The pause was long and Dean thought perhaps Cas wouldn’t answer at all.

“No. I will continue east. If a dryad spots me from the air, they may rescue me and accept me back to Aether as a citizen after extensive questioning, but I cannot return as a Sentry without you and your brother in my charge… And I do not wish to execute that task.”

It took Dean a few moments to sift through the pile of bricks Castiel had just dropped on him. There was a thank you in there somewhere, but more importantly…

“You idiot. You’re not gonna just head east to the wasteland to starve.” Of course, Dean didn’t mention that he was just as likely to starve here in the valley, but he couldn’t let him just take off wandering when the guy didn’t even know how to light a fire that didn’t start with the flip of a switch. He couldn’t let him die. Dean rubbed the back of his neck. There was only one way to prevent that, and it wasn’t a solution Dean was prepared to offer, but nothing about the last twenty-four hours had gone according to plan. He’d do what he had to.

“You’ll stay with me. Sam will be home soon, but we’ll make it work. You’re not gonna starve. Without your little Audium, you’re basically like – “ Dean gestured at him, “a baby in a trench coat.”

Castiel’s stone carved expression shifted. Dean had actually managed to insult him with that last comment, but before he had time to feel accomplished, his back was slammed against the tin side of one of the cubicles at the Salvage. Castiel’s face was inches from his and his jaw jutted out aggressively.

“I slept in your presence because, even in unconsciousness and without my gear, I am still capable of ending your life with my bare hands. I left my home, I left everything, for you. I did it all for you. So that you or your brother wouldn’t have to –“ He took a breath and closed his eyes. “You should show me some respect.”

He practically spit in Dean’s face, but he couldn’t bring himself to retaliate. His mind was entirely wiped blank in the sheer surprise of Cas’ reaction to a harmless quip. All he managed to do was swallow in response, his tongue grazing over his dry lips. Cas took his hand from Dean’s shirt where it had been clenched and he stalked away.

“Look,” Dean tried to reason with him as he caught up, “Stay. Just Stay.”

He couldn’t keep an eye on Cas when he went to see Ellen, but he could take him to check on Sam and maybe he’d stick around. Sam was always more convincing.  
“I’ve gotta go see my brother. Come with me. We’ll figure it all out, okay?”

He took Castiel’s silence as cooperation and started off in the direction of the hospital.

 

X

 

As he walked into the structure that looked as if it might collapse at any minute, close behind Dean, Castiel was well aware that he was being babysat. But he could understand that Dean couldn’t bring him to speak to the woman whose daughter was taken by his comrades, and he wasn’t sure he’d want to be present for that exchange anyway. He also was well aware that Dean was distrusting of him, and that was mutual.

Aside from that, Castiel was curious about this place they called a hospital. He understood that the lifestyle of the Dreck valley was vastly different than that of Aether, but he never knew that they were deprived of medical necessities such as Expoticum. They used remedies of the old world. The healers were volunteers, people with obligations to help where they could because very few had medical knowledge. It was a far different scene from Aether healthcare centers where the walls were white and the smell was sterile and metallic, machines lined the waiting room walls to diagnose and treat minor issues, or direct one to a more specialized machine for any other analysis. Sam Winchester’s room was merely a curtain on a rod bolted to the ceiling to divide the larger atrium into smaller sections. From the outside, it appeared that the back portion of the building was a more sturdy structure of bricks but the front was only sheets of metal nailed into place and some semi-weather proof material that draped down where any holes gaped in the walls and ceilings. It was an amalgam of architecture from before the war, destroyed by some weapon of great caliber, and patched up by the hands of survivors. He marveled that Aether had rid itself of any evidence that a war had ever occurred, or that there was ever any civilization before them. The Dreck valley absorbed what it could from the past, and the evidence was unavoidable.

“Hey Sammy,” Dean spoke in what struck Castiel as the most gentle voice he’d ever heard him use as he approached Sam’s cot. Sam only smiled at him in response and tried to sit up with a grimace. He looked at Castiel and back to Dean inquisitively.

“This is Castiel. You remember? He was there.”

Sam’s eyes widened, and where Castiel expected rage, he saw admiration.

“Castiel, yeah. You saved my brother. Twice.”

Sam held out his hand, and it was much stronger than it looked. Castiel’s hand felt willowy inside it. He covered Sam’s hand with his other one and looked him in the eye to convey earnest.

“It’s good to see you alive,” Castiel responded, and noticed upon looking back to Dean that redness crept up his neck, surely at the admission that he’d told Sam about their previous encounter.

“You’re a pain in the ass little brother, you know that?” Dean said, running a rough but affectionate hand through Sam’s shaggy brown hair. He only hummed in response.  
“Alright, well… I got business with Ellen, so – “

“Wait,” Sam’s face showed a great effort to remember the previous night. “Jo.” His shoulders fell as he seemed to remember, and Castiel turned away out of guilt when he saw tears welling up in the corners of Sam’s eyes.

There was a long silence and Castiel pretended to examine the curtain while he assumed the Winchester brothers exchanged meaningful looks about the situation at hand. He heard faint murmuring he couldn’t decipher.

“Okay, I’m out. Stay outta trouble, bitch,” Dean finally said, and breezed past Castiel, turning to look over his shoulder at the threshold. Castiel nodded at him, as if to say ‘I’ll stay’.

“Jerk,” Sam called back to him. 

Castiel found their diction strange, but they seemed to use the words endearingly.

For a long time, he only hovered around the small space avoiding Sam’s eyes, which followed his every move. Sam was far easier to be around, more relaxed about who Castiel was, more casual. However, that could have been the result of whatever he was given to kill his pain. Eventually, his nurse, the same young woman from before, slipped into the curtain and the entire atmosphere shifted.

“How are we doing, Sam?” she said in a sunny voice.

“Fine. Jessica, this is Castiel. He’s the reason you didn’t have to stitch up my brother, too.”

She took a step towards him in acknowledgement but didn’t extend her hand as she was stretching a pair of blue rubbery gloves over them.

“Oh, a knight in shining armor,” she winked. “Call me Jess.” Her hair was a sandy color and her face had an optimistic glow despite the shallow bruises beneath her eyes. She must not have left since the previous night. Once again, Castiel found himself amazed by these human healers who did the best they could with their hands what a machine in Aether could cure in minutes.

“I apologize that I couldn’t have prevented your injury as well,” Castiel explained.

Sam waved him off.

Jess fluttered around Sam’s cot putting odd devices against various parts of his body and giving him approving looks. She rolled him over and lifted his shirt to examine the spot where his more severe wound was. Sam winced and gripped his hands around the thin sheets and Jess mumbled to him reassuringly.

When she left the room, the silence between them returned for a few minutes. Eventually, Sam began asking him questions. Castiel answered them with honesty when he could, but there were instances when he couldn’t disclose information about the Garrison or the Aetherian government system. Sam seemed to realize when boundaries were crossed, and would change the subject promptly. He had an encyclopedic historical knowledge and his questions nearly all addressed academic subjects; Castiel was simply grateful he didn’t inquire about his childhood or emotions. There were a few instances that Castiel thought might have been a window to ask Sam his own questions about what they were doing at the fence, not to mention the burning question of how Dean got inside Aether, but he held his tongue. 

 

He grew to appreciate Sam’s company in the few hours he had and when Dean returned, Sam was clutching his abdomen in laughter at something Castiel had said, although he didn’t understand the humor.

The change in Dean’s demeanor was obvious when he didn’t immediately make jests about something upon his arrival. He surveyed the room and seemed somewhat surprised to find Castiel still there and Sam in good spirits and Dean’s shoulders relaxed minutely. Sam obviously itched for information on the exchange between Ellen and Dean, but he didn’t prod.

Dean cleared his throat a few times like he might begin an explanation, but nothing ever came out. His eyes were red and his face looked sallow. For the first time since coming to the Dreck valley, Castiel realized none of them had eaten, and Dean had gotten even less sleep than he had.

When Jess entered the curtain again, Sam finally spoke.

“So I guess I’ll be staying at least another night.” Sam’s eyes went to Jess who was rummaging through drawers for her devices again. Castiel heard her stifling a giggle.

“Everything’s good though?” said Dean.

Jess turned toward them then and there was a slight flush to her cheeks. “He’s recovering very well, he’ll be out of here in no time. I just don’t want to take any risks with his stitches.”

Dean only nodded. He seemed to have caught on that Sam was more than willing to stay at the hospital and, if Castiel’s inferences were correct, with Jess. They said their goodbyes, Dean more solemnly than usual, and departed.

When Dean and Castiel returned to the hovel Dean called a home, they were quiet. Dean lit a small fire inside of a strange brick box built into the wall and it maintained a slightly more comfortable temperature. He went to a cupboard in the area that served as a kitchen and pulled out a dark brown bottle of liquid and poured two glasses. Castiel assumed it was an alcoholic beverage but it wasn’t something he recognized. Dean said nothing, but approached him with one glass to his lips, holding the other out in offering. Castiel took it out of courtesy but it smelled awful. He put it to his lips and tipped the glass back just enough to coat the tip of his tongue. It tasted warm and nauseatingly sweet but with a burn like cleaning products.

He nursed the glass until, eventually, finally, he had consumed it all. That sharp warmth now felt rooted where his collarbones met. The silence between them became more comfortable, but Castiel still felt like questions were stacked from the pit of his stomach to the tip of his tongue, and they wouldn’t stay down much longer. He knew better than to breach the subject of his conversation with the woman he called Ellen, but he thought it might be beneficial to Dean’s psychological health at this time to ask him about other subject matter.

“Dean,” he said, carefully.

“Mmm.”

The questions, now that he had to choose one, were bombarding his mind. Who was Dean? How was he raised? What was he doing at the fence? What was it like growing up in the valley? Why didn’t they have the things Aether had? Would Dean even know the answers? Castiel realized, if he was asked the same things, he wouldn’t know. With all of his education and privilege, there was so much he’d never known.

“Five years ago,” Castiel began, unsure, “what – how did you – why were you,” he huffed in annoyance at his ineloquence. Dean’s eyes rose to meet his and he took pity on him, understanding what he meant.

“I guess you could say I’m a con-man.”

Castiel knew, if he waited, Dean would say more.

“I got into the wrong crowd, or… it isn’t exactly wrong. It’s the only crowd around here that doesn’t starve to death. I did what I had to. There’s a group, a sort of underground clique. The leader, he’s a sleazeball, but he taught me what I needed to know to get in there. I sweet-talked my way into the beds of some wealthy women who thought the rugged boy act was attractive, and I snuck money or supplies from them. Crap they’d never know went missing, but it could feed me and Sammy for months.”

Once again, that guilt speared him. He’d always gazed out at this land from his high tower in the Garrison and thought it was a beautiful and free place. But after only one day here, he’d understood. Dreck was filthy; toxic with the corpses of luxuries they never got to enjoy.

“And on the fence? You were trying to explode it?” Castiel asked.

“Nah. That was a mishap because we got caught, and I fell. We were trying for a contained, temporary power outage. It’s how I get into Aether – or did – now that the fences are electric. We also harness the lightning’s energy to power our generator for a while. The hospital uses it for critical patients sometimes, or we’ll just sell some time hooked up at the Salvage.”

Castiel didn’t know why Dean trusted him enough to reveal so much information about his illegal activity. He could easily report back to Aether and make it impossible for Dean to ever trespass again. But he couldn’t think of it as trespassing anymore. It was cruel. After what he’d seen in the valley, he knew he could never deny anyone access to Aether. Something was terribly wrong with the injustice of those fences.

He noticed then the small black device that looked much like an older model of an Audium sitting on a bedside table. He ran his fingers across it, and Dean watched him silently. Castiel pulled his own disarmed Audium out of the side of his boot where he’d shoved it when it malfunctioned. He handed it to Dean. From the information he’d collected, Dean was something of a genius when it came to building technology from scraps. No one else in the valley had an Audium or generator, and he knew from his time as a Sentry that harnessing the power of lightning was immensely difficult and dangerous. Aether only achieved it with very costly materials and years of research. He’d also recognized Dean’s abundance of weaponry and, given what he’d gathered, he was confident that Dean had designed those as well.

Dean turned Castiel’s defective Audium over in his hands, examining it with a keen eye.

“I remember… The blue light,” Dean said.

“It is a screen that is projected onto my cornea.”

“I figured. It made you look creepy. But also… kinda badass, you know?” Dean lifted his chin then to look Castiel in the eyes. Dean’s were dark and flickering in the dim evening firelight.

“It reminded me of the stories from the ancient texts. In the old world, they all flipped out over this one book, it even caused some of the wars. Sam’s into all that, history and stuff. My mom used to like the old legends, too. She told me when I was little, ‘Angels are watching over you’. Well, I looked up what an angel was one day.”

Castiel’s body had pitched forward involuntarily, enraptured by Dean’s story.

“They were warriors of God. Nearly every old world civilization believed in them. They were beautiful and terrifying. This guy Daniel, in the book, he wrote that they had wings, like a bird, but they took a human form.”

Dean’s fingertips ghosted over Castiel’s forearm where his suit had lightweight, heat protective layers that mimicked a blackbird’s feathers, blue tinged.

“Arms and legs that gleamed like polished chrome,” he continued, and his fingers absently traced the silver conductors that framed his arm.

“They had eyes like lightning, and voices like thunder.”

Castiel felt his breath hitch in his throat and he couldn’t tear his eyes from where Dean’s fingers met his arm. He couldn’t physically feel the contact through the fabric, but a tingling sensation still followed the touch, as if every blood vessel under Dean’s hand ruptured, as if his suit was the only thing containing a raging fire, as if fractures would open up like veins through the material any second, and it would be lava, not blood, that came pouring out. Castiel didn’t realize how much he liked storms but they obviously made him feel something. Or maybe it was the angels. Or maybe…

When he composed himself, he looked up to find Dean also angled towards him, and their faces were close enough to share air. Dean snapped back to proper posture and murmured something about personal space, taking the last swallow of his drink.

“Dean, do you have this book?”

“What, the bible?” Dean asked.

“Old world culture is not taught, or even mentioned, within Aether.”

“Like they pretend it didn’t happen?” Dean looked incredulous.

“Erasure is the objective, yes,” Castiel says grimly.

Dean stood up and sifted through a shelf hugging the wall near the fire. He came back with a dusty, leather bound book. A real book. Its pages were so thin and worn that they felt like velvet on Castiel’s fingers. He stroked the printed words on the pages and his brow furrowed, trying to understand why something so beautiful would be forbidden. He flipped through reading random lines and smiling occasionally.

“My mom was big on traditions of the old world. She liked to believe it wasn’t all bad.” Dean’s eyes were far away. Castiel’s brows pinched together and he tilted his head in a questioning manner.

“She… uh, she died when I was nine.”

Castiel nodded once and didn’t ask for further information, seeing that Dean didn’t revel in that particular conversational topic.

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares,” Castiel quoted and looked at Dean so he wouldn’t miss the answering smile.

“C’mere,” Dean said, and craned his head towards to shelf of books.

Castiel shut the old text in his hand and crossed the room. On the shelf near the books were little relics. One was a white stone sculpture of a tiny child with wings and next to that, two pieces of wood bound together perpendicularly by a leather cord. Dean reached his hand down the front of his shirt and pulled it back out with a gold amulet in his hand. For the rest of the night, Castiel listened to Dean’s chronicle of these artifacts and their meanings, frequently mentioning that Sam was more knowledgeable about antiquity. The amulet had been a gift from Sam, who got it from their uncle Bobby. Dean held it fondly in his palm. The crucifix had been a bygone symbol of faith, and he listened to the tale of a man who was nailed to a cross and tortured, but forgave every offender before his death. For brief moments, when Dean was enthralled in his stories, he felt the raw vulnerability of him. He could see, in glimpses, how young Dean really was. Dean, who lived to protect his brother, who took no esteem for his staggering intellect, who blamed himself for Jo’s capture, was sitting before Castiel with wide, childlike eyes, making flailing motions with his hands and getting lost in descriptions of another time. Castiel was lost with him.

As he watched the golden flames cast light dancing across Dean’s cheeks, he imagined that was what Dean’s soul looked like, in that moment, at its nucleus. Vulnerable, but radiant and pulsing. Before a smile could lift his lips, Castiel thought for the first time of his own selfishness. He thought he’d given up his position for Dean, but all he did was become level with him. Dean had never once had luxuries of Aether, dedicated his life to keeping his family fed, and Castiel was a danger to that fragile balance he had found. Perhaps Dean had been right about Castiel being an infant wearing a trench coat. Castiel had become enraged at that remark, losing his composure like he so rarely did, like he had been trained not to do. Dean had stripped his nerves raw. Castiel had nearly injured him simply because he was raised all his life to become a Sentry, and for the past five years in the Garrison, he had commanded the compliance of everyone around him. Now, not only did he have nothing to offer Dean, he also had a price on his head. If a Sentry paid a visit to the valley and Castiel was found, Dean and Sam would both be detained indefinitely.

He borrowed a change of clothes once again for the night and slid beneath the blanket of sewn-together scraps draped across Sam’s bed. It smelled of firewood and cinnamon and pine. Unlike the previous night, Castiel didn’t drift to sleep planning escape routes and methods of swift attack, didn’t take inventory of every object in the room that could be used as a weapon, didn’t scope out Dean’s weaknesses. This night, he breathed deeply into every taut muscle of his torso, releasing tension that he hadn’t realized had been there for days. This night, Dean slept too, across the room, and Castiel thought of the stories as he watched him draw steady breaths.

The angels were fierce; they protected the righteous. Dean was the most righteous man Castiel had ever met and there was only one way he could think of to ensure Dean’s and Sam’s well-being. The sight of Dean's sleeping form hurt, and where he imagined his body to be a furnace before, it now felt like ice.


	4. Etymology

When Castiel woke, it was a slow transition from a pleasant but very light sleep. He felt comfortable in the Winchester’s home with the fire unkindled, nothing but a faint golden glow from beneath the blackened logs, but an anticipation sung through his body that kept him on the lip of dreaming. 

The light was dull and purple and he could smell the crisp dew still beaded up untouched on the blades of grass outside the cabin. It was unfamiliar, something he’d never woken to from the height and isolation of his room in the Garrison, but it smelled so serene. His body protested every move, feeling hollow with hunger and shaky with fatigue, but his eyes were wide and alert. Castiel lifted his torso from the bed and pivoted to set his feet on the cold wooden floor. He stood slowly and carefully so as to not let the floorboards creek, but something made a scraping noise on the other side of the thin wood and parchment divide between Sam’s bed and Dean’s. He didn’t hear any other movement that might have been Dean, but he couldn’t place that sound. He’d resolved last night to wake early and leave, trading some silver from his suit and boots for necessities at the Salvage and heading into the wasteland. He wasn’t sure what exactly was in the wasteland, only that it had previously been radioactive in some areas. Surely there were other communities of people farther away from Aether. Surely Aether wasn’t the only city to rebuild. Now, he thought perhaps Dean had known his motives and was awake now to stop him. Perhaps Sam had been released from the hospital. Perhaps someone else was here with ill-intentions (he wasn’t sure how frequent crime was in the Dreck valley, but he could imagine it being reasonably common). The noise continued with regularity.

He slid his Ignaparum gun from the inside of his boot tucked just beneath the bed frame and pressed his back to his side of the divide, peeking over his shoulder with caution. His eyes scanned the room thoroughly and he saw no perpetrator. Finally, Castiel’s eyes settled on Dean’s sleeping form. Dean’s back was to Castiel, but the next time the scraping sound happened, he saw Dean’s back expand with breath and shake violently upon his exhale. Castiel’s eyes widened. The sound came from Dean’s lungs, his body. Surely Dean did not always make this noise in his sleep. It was nothing like the snoring of some of his comrades when they shared bunk beds in the training quarters. This was a wet, wheezing sound. He didn’t know what action to take as he’d never seen someone shaking in their sleep. It could have been a sickness, but he’d never known anyone to become this sick. They were always given Expoticum upon the first sign of an illness and they’d be fine the next day. Beyond the universal healer or the treatment centers of Aether, he had no knowledge of how to help Dean, and he didn’t have access to either.

Castiel rounded the end of Dean’s bed cautiously to get a look at his face. He was indeed still sleeping, but his eyes were twitching restlessly beneath his lids. His face looked waxy and pale and a sheen of sweat made the front of his hair stick to his forehead. More sweat pooled in the hollow between his clavicles and darkened the front of his t-shirt. His hands were fisted tightly in his quilt, his body undulating between rough shivering and light trembling. Castiel considered for a moment going to get Jess from the hospital, but he was very reluctant to leave Dean here like this. Maybe he could wake him long enough to carry him to her instead. All he knew was that his resolve to leave had fallen entirely limp; he couldn’t leave Dean like this.

“Dean?” Castiel probed warily with one knee on Dean’s mattress and one hand on his knee.

Dean didn’t seem to respond at all, and Castiel’s worry escalated into panic. He crawled on all fours up closer to Dean’s head and put both hands on his torso, shaking more insistently.

“Dean! Wake up,” Castiel’s breath was coming shorter, his alarm alleviated only by the fact that Dean still breathed, however painfully. “Please,” he whispered. “I don’t know what to do.”

He finally got a sharp intake of breath out of Dean as his eyes burst open quickly. Dean’s entire body tensed under Castiel’s grip and he reached for a knife beneath his pillow. He might have even managed a slice to Castiel’s flesh if he hadn’t been drowsy with whatever sickness he had come down with. Castiel caught his wrist and hushed Dean until his breathing slowed and his bleary eyes seemed to focus and realize that Castiel wasn’t a threat.

“Cas? Holy hell,” Dean finally said and Castiel released a deep breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He cleared his throat and shifted his weight off of Dean’s body, sitting back on his heels, remembering Dean’s scolding about personal space. Dean’s voice sounded as if it was being raked out of his throat and he took longer than usual to swallow afterwards, wincing.

“You’re very sick, Dean.”

“Nah, I just… Can you get me some of that whiskey?” He coughed and his entire body convulsed at the end as if it wanted to expel something it didn’t have in it.

Castiel knew that some lower rank Sentries would be sent to escort people home from nightclubs where they drank. He recalled one time that Balthazar returned to the Garrison with a grimace on his face and vomit down his leg.

“I don’t think that is the best remedy for you right now.”

Dean scoffed back at him but was apparently too exhausted to dispute. He fell back onto his pillow with a groan and shut his eyes again.

“Dean, please do not sleep. You need to see a doctor.”

Dean’s hand weakly lifted and waved Castiel away. That same hand then fell across his eyes and he smacked his lips together in displeasure.

“This is nothing, Cas. Doctors are busy saving lives. I’m tellin’ you, I’ll be fine.” Dean tried to roll himself out of bed, but his balance seemed very unstable and Castiel put his hands on his shoulders again to force him back down. Dean winced even harder this time and Castiel removed his hands, startled, when he remembered the deep burn on Dean’s shoulder. His cotton shirt was stuck to it in places and it looked like it might have been infected.

“Just lay back, Dean. What can I get?” Castiel asked, trying to keep the distress from his voice.

Dean took his time answering as if he sifted through his options.

“Boil some water and then set it to cool. And get me the damn whiskey.”

He had to be walked through kindling the fire back to life before he could hang a pot of the rusty water over it. He was also apprehensive of giving Dean the whiskey, concerned that it might knock him out, and then Castiel would be useless to his recovery. When he handed Dean the thick glass bottle, however, he pulled a torn rag from one of the drawers beside his bed and put it to the mouth of the bottle, flipping it over to soak a section of the rag.

“Take this,” Dean ordered, handing him the wet rag. “Hold my arm down so I don’t clock you in the jaw, and press it to the burn.”

Castiel did as he was asked, holding back his questions. Dean hadn’t meant to drink the whiskey, but apply it to his skin. It must be another strange remedy of the old world. He wrapped his hand around Dean’s wrist and pushed it into the mattress. Dean’s skin was cold and clammy and he could feel the feeble shaking in the bones that protruded against his own palm.

“Just do it fast,” Dean said, squeezing his eyes shut and turning his head into his other shoulder. Castiel braced himself and pressed the cloth to the burn. Dean’s arm convulsed but it stayed by his side. Dean choked out profanities through clenched teeth and Castiel immediately removed the cloth, hushing him again.

“I’m sorry, Dean. What is this doing to you?” he asked, looking at the cloth accusingly.

“It’s got a high concentration of alcohol so it’s sterilizing the wound.” His chest heaved less with each breath but his inhales still sounded painful and rattling. “You’re gonna have to do it again, anywhere the skin is open or there’s puss or something.”

Castiel went through the motions, peeling the fabric of Dean’s shirt away from where the dried blood adhered to it. He eventually was able to disregard Dean’s pain and hold the rag to his skin relentlessly. The faster he could complete this task, the better. 

“Is your internal sickness caused by this wound as well?” Castiel asked.

“M’not sure. Might be because I haven’t eaten in a few days and I spent a few hours in the cold rain. Could be mild pneumonia.”

Castiel gaped at him. He himself hadn’t eaten since he left Aether the evening of the storm, but his suit was insulated and he hadn’t been wounded during the explosion. Dean’s body didn’t look like one that was only fed occasionally. He had a broad chest and bulky shoulders that filled his shirt, the ridges of muscle visible on his arms. His surfaces were smooth and no bones jutted out without a layer of brawniness over them.

“S’what happens when we fail a mission, man. The power from a storm that big can keep us fed for a month, but if we don’t do it right, we’re either blown to smithereens or we starve to death.” Dean’s voice is slurred like his tongue is heavier in his mouth.

Castiel flinched at the hostility behind Dean’s words, though it was well-deserved, and Dean’s eyes looked away from him apologetically.

“Have you failed before?” Castiel had never known hunger like this. He was fed routine meals of perfectly calculated nutrition for a warrior’s body three times a day with very little variation. He had never even known the first twinge of hunger until now, and both his heart and body ached for the people of the valley who had known nothing but that discomfort.

“I, uh.. I haven’t. But when I was little, my dad and his crew did a few times. Lost some friends in accidents, and we’d all go hungry for a while. Children usually get taken care of by someone around here. We watch out for each other.”

Castiel remembered something Dean had said about lending some harnessed power from his generator to the hospital if they had patients in critical care, and the way that the Salvage ran on the trade of goods, whether comforts or necessities. They had no monetary system, although precious metals were still the most valuable asset. He marveled at the sense of community; in Aether, everything had strict monetary value, even medical assistance or entertainment or pleasant company.

“You have no other family left, now?” Castiel asked with a sympathetic look. He didn’t quite understand the conventions of a family, but he recognized Dean’s closeness and camaraderie with his brother as the relationship between some Sentries.

“Not blood. But Jo was like a sister.” Dean’s eyes were glassy and his expression hardened. “Her mom took us in after dad disappeared. Then there’s Bobby, he lost his legs in an accident at the fences when they were first figuring out how to reconduct the power. We’d all die for each other, but we keep our distance. There’s always an elephant in the room when we’re together.” Castiel became concerned at that last sentence. Dean was beginning to speak nonsense. He laid the back of his hand across Dean’s forehead and gave him a concerned look.

“Dean, elephants are an extinct species,” he began. Dean swatted his hand away and chuckled, which turned into another violent coughing fit.

“It’s just an old saying, Cas,” he gasped out.

He felt relief that Dean was still coherent and frustration because he didn’t understand yet another reference. Dean’s stomach began to make a ferocious gurgling noise and he looked down at it, exasperated. This was something Castiel knew as a sign of hunger, although he wasn’t sure if his own stomach had ever done such a thing before.

“Will you remain here if I go to the Salvage to get some sustenance for you?”

“Cas, I can go, let me just –“

With a hand on his uninjured shoulder, Castiel repeated Dean’s words to him.

“Stay. Just stay.” Dean collapsed back down with a displeased huff, but made no other protest.

 

X

 

When Cas returned with food, Dean could have kissed him. He’d brought back some sort of stew in old washed out aluminum cans from the Salvage junkyard and Dean could only assume it came from Pamela. Imagining Mr. Straight-Laces interacting with Pamela, the flirtiest woman he’d ever known, was an amusing thought and he wondered if she’d tried to grope him, too.

The food was still hot and Dean nearly groaned at the first swallow, having felt nothing warm in his stomach in days. Sometimes the burn of whiskey numbed the absence of food, but there came a point where it made the hunger worse. With his mouth still full, he tilted his chin up and spoke from the corner of his mouth.

“What’d you give up this time?”

Castiel glanced down at his leg where another strip of his silver was missing.

“I assume you met my friend Pam,” Dean said with a wink, lifting the can in reference.

“She called me pretty and I almost gouged her eye out,” Castiel said, entirely deadpan.

Dean nearly choked. “What?”

“On accident, of course. I was holding a sharp piece of metal in my hand when she said it. I was caught off guard. I apologized profusely.” 

If it didn’t hurt so much to laugh, Dean would have been in an uproar at that story. Instead, he got a strenuous workout for his cheek muscles while trying to contain the hysterics that bubbled up every time he looked at Cas, head cocked and brows pulled together. Cas had to have been the most awkward person Dean had ever met; the way he was serious at all times, never spoke with hand gestures, didn’t get puns. It would have been endearing if he didn’t have the memory of being slammed against a tin siding for poking fun at him.

They finished eating in silence except for Dean’s occasional slurp. Castiel began to look and act antsy, his eyes surveying the room like a cornered animal. He opened his mouth as if to speak of few times but nothing ever came out and Dean thought he might be bored. The other explanation would be that something suspicious was going on. He had grown to trust Castiel more than he expected to in the past few days but he still had plenty to be wary about. Cas didn’t appear to be in communication with anyone from Aether but he knew better than most that their surveillance was discrete and that this man was trained for stealth, to operate in shadows. He knew the techniques from Crowley, the man who’d taught him how to sneak in to Aether in the first place. His tactics were perhaps not as refined, but he knew the concepts of clandestine intelligence. It was still possible that his Audium was turned on, or could be remotely turned on from someone in the place Cas called the ‘Garrison’. That someone in Sentry headquarters could be listening in, whether Castiel was aware or not.

But aside from every lesson he’d ever been taught from his dad or Bobby or even Crowley about staying paranoid and alert and on guard like a good little soldier, something about this particular guy disarmed him. It wasn’t that he felt safe. Castiel was ferocious, he’d seen a glimpse of that when he mocked him, and although he was shorter than Dean and maybe just a little slighter, he was imposing in his stance, the set of his jaw, the square of his shoulders. He wielded weapons Dean wasn’t familiar with and knew how to use them with lethal precision. No, it wasn’t that he was safe. He might have been the most dangerous person to ever share Dean’s company. But he felt pure. He felt honest. Like the Cas that Dean had seen in the last few days was the only Cas there was, the Cas that had always been. He didn’t have layers. He wasn’t exactly an open book, but he was a book that would open if you just dusted it off and turned the pages.

Dean decided then that it was a good day to test the waters of Castiel, see where the waves break and what lurks beneath them. He’d start the day with checking on Sam first, and then a tour of the Dreck was in order.

“What do you say we stop in on Sam and then maybe I can show you around?” Dean finally broke the silence. Cas looked like he’d just been ripped from another dimension and he blinked a few times, processing.

“Are you sure you're well enough?”

"I'm fine. Honest." He did a few jumping jacks as proof and plastered on a goofy smile.

"Um.. Yes, I'd like that, then."

Despite his affirmative, Dean got the feeling he was reluctant to accept the offer. Maybe he was wrong about Castiel’s honesty. This was the first time he’d seen a flicker of falseness, but maybe he’d just been blind before.

“You have something else in mind?”

“No, Dean. I’ve wanted to see the valley for myself…for many years.”

 

Cas ripped a few more shards of silver from the seams of his suit to take with them but today, at Dean’s suggestion, he wore normal clothes. He borrowed Dean’s pants and Sam’s old flannel and Dean had to conceal a dozen smirks at the way the denim hung low on his hips because they were too big, and Sam’s massive shirt made Castiel look substantially less threatening. Delicate, even. But where the skin of his neck peaked out from the dip of the button-up shirt and his forearms shone where the sleeves were rolled, his skin was still that marble-white with firm definition beneath. Dean began to think that the I-can-snap-your-neck-with-one-hand look wasn’t the suit; it was just something Cas carried with him. The clothes only made him look slightly more humanly disheveled and slightly less otherworldly. Of course, he still insisted on wearing his ridiculous tan trench coat.

 

The hospital smelled like piss and vomit and metallic blood more than usual when they walked in. No healers came to them, no one waited in the atrium, but he could hear hushed whispers behind curtains and agonized screams in the distance. Dean found a sense of relief that the voice didn’t belong to Sam, but he also opened up a giant can of guilt because if he had been successful on his mission, he would have been able to bring the generator in to help the poor bastard, not to mention Sam would never be holed up in the first place. He had never come back from a failed mission; he never thought he would. He assumed if he failed, it would be the end of him. He never anticipated making it out at the cost of someone else.

Castiel walked more hastily towards Sam’s curtain than Dean did, possibly because to him, that voice could have been Sam. Dean knew Sam’s screams. He wished he didn’t. But he knew them well, and that wasn’t him. Except when Cas tore back to thin sheet that hung around Sam’s room, he wasn’t there. The bed sheets were imprinted, not made up or tucked in, like Sam had been there recently but was moved. Something dangerous curled in his stomach – maybe those weren’t Sam’s screams, but that didn’t mean Sam wasn’t involved somehow.

“Sammy!” Dean hollered, stomping from behind the curtain and down the hall towards to older part of the building; the part Dean knew held the critical ward. He turned a sharp corner at full speed and collided with another body, knocking someone over and nearly falling on his ass himself. When he looked down, it was Jess sprawled on the floor with a silver tray of bloody metal utensils. She did a double take and then Dean’s worry must have registered.

“Oh Dean! Sam’s fine. He’s fine,” she said in a matronly, reassuring voice. Dean’s shoulders relaxed immediately but he still glared at her expectantly. “He’s feeling much better. We had a critical patient come in and… Sam volunteered to help.” The last part, she said with a smile creeping across her face. Dean recognized it as the look of awe people get when they’ve just realized how amazing Sam is. He sighed deeply.

“Yeah, that sounds like him.”

Cas caught up to Dean, nearly running him over too. He laid a hand on Dean’s shoulder as soon as it was within reach. Dean merely looked behind him and nodded to let Cas know all was well.

“We used to bring a generator in here when we could. Help with some patients that really needed power. Life support, or whatever. I helped with the electrical stuff, making sure things were working properly. Sam, though, he watched the healers do their thing, stood by if anyone needed a hand. The first time he saw someone come back to life on a resuscitator, he cried.”

Jess let out a wet huff of breath and her eyes were damp in the corners. Once again, she looked as if she hadn’t slept but a few hours.

“He’s gonna kill me for telling you that,” Dean said and patted Jess on the back in a gesture of comfort. She seemed to appreciate the effort but she winced at the weight of his hand. Her body was so much smaller than Sam’s. Jess put her finger to her lips and mimed the universal sign for ‘my-lips-are-sealed’. She reminded him a lot of Jo, only Jess tended to be friendlier and less likely to stomp on Dean’s foot.

“Dean!” Sam called out, loping up behind Jess. “Castiel,” he added in greeting, looking surprised to see him still around.

“So Sammy, we heard you’re playing doctor.”

Sam gave a sheepish smile and shrugged with his blue gloved hands. He moved to stand close behind Jess and she nudged him affectionately with a shoulder and looked up at him with dough-y eyes. Dean rolled his eyes and made a gagging sound but in reality he was thrilled. Sam was finally making his own friends outside of the conning business and he was getting involved with something he’d always loved. Dean knew he had a thorough knowledge of medical procedures, particularly old world remedies, and he was glad Sam had found an outlet to put them to practice. Not to mention, he was obviously smitten with his new lady-friend. He’d always theorized that Sam didn’t even attempt to be social because he would have to either keep secrets or put Dean and the business in jeopardy. Dean knew what it meant to sever ties, pretend to be indifferent, pretend to feel nothing in order to protect someone from getting caught up in a dangerous game. As good as it felt to see that warm glow Sam had on his face, Dean felt a premature guilt knowing that one day – whether Sam knew it now or not – one day, it would all turn very cold. That was the life.

They returned to Sam’s little cubicle to talk for a while since the screaming patient was stabilized and he needed to eat something after hours in the critical ward getting splattered with blood. Sam had a strong enough stomach to sit on his bed eating a tuna fish sandwich that Jess had given him and talk about the gore he’d seen all afternoon. Dean concealed his fatigue and sickness as well as he could. He felt a lot better after the stew anyway, and the rest should clear up on its own. He had nothing to offer the healers so he would refuse any treatment they offered anyway. He felt bad enough not having any electricity for them. 

Dean noticed that Castiel had been silent nearly the entire day and when he looked to him he only found a very far-away look on his face.

He snapped his fingers in front of Cas’ face. “Hey, man. Where’d you go?”

“I have been right here, Dean.” Cas blinked at Dean and leaned into his space like he hadn’t realized Dean was beside him the whole time, his blue eyes fixed on Dean’s face and he felt his ears burning. Cas' hand reached up very slowly to Dean's forehead but Dean slapped it away as soon as he realized he was checking his temperature. If Sam caught wind of the fact that he'd been sick this morning, he'd never let him out of here.

It must have been a few moments of awkward silence because Sam cleared his throat. “Ahem, so Cas, are you interested in medicine as well?” he asked, having noticed the way Cas stared intently at the tools Jess used on Sam when he was still healing.

“Not particularly. But I am interested in this particular treatment facility. I don’t know what I expected of the valley but the lack of advanced medication and machines is the most unsettling of all. I am sorry. You are all brave and resilient.”

Sam, always psyched about new information and never judgmental, began asking questions about the types of hospitals in Aether. Castiel told him about strange machines with automated voices. Dean had never been to one but it wasn’t hard to imagine knowing the way screens talk and pictures move and sometimes even respond in Aether. Artificial intelligence was probably the biggest divide between the city and the valley. It was what gave Aether so much power.

Castiel relayed stories about how his older comrades, a few years above him in training, got into a quarrel one day and both ended up in the Garrison’s emergency medical center with busted skulls and broken femurs. It sounded like typical brother behavior, but Castiel didn’t look amused.

“Wait, did you say their names were Michael and Gabriel?” Sam interrupted.

Castiel nodded with a question unspoken and a head tilt.

“What are some other names of Sentries?” he asked in an almost urgent tone, leaning forward. Dean knew what he might be inquiring about, but he wasn’t as well-versed in old world folklore as Sam was.

“Raphael, Uriel, Balthazar… I maybe should not disclose this information,” he said, looking between Dean and Sam with uncertainty.

“I’m sorry. It’s just those are all names of angels in Christianity, a theology of the old world. I didn’t recognize your name when I heard it, although it sounds religious in etymology, but those others I definitely know. They’re in scripture,” Sam said.

Castiel was quiet for a long time, looking incredulous. Dean knew he remembered him telling him all about angels, but Dean hadn’t known then that Cas was actually named after one. That they all were, apparently intentionally.

“I – in Aether, we do not learn of history or religion. Those are the names of our stars, constellations, nebulae. I was never aware that we took theological names from the old world and pasted them onto a hard science like astronomy.” He looked at his lap and shook his head slowly. Dean tried to lean into Cas’ line of sight to catch his eye but he continued to stare straight down.

“Uh, Cas if you don’t mind me asking, who named you? I mean, are those guys all like your brothers? Do you actually have parents?” Dean wished he had held his tongue, but once the questions started, he kept thinking of better ones.

Castiel took a deep, desperate breath and finally looked up with panic in his eyes. He stood abruptly, sending the chair groaning across the broken tile floor, and walked straight for the exit. Sam gave Dean an apologetic look and shrugged at Dean before Dean followed.

“I’ll see you tonight, Sammy?” he called over his shoulder.

Sam said something in response but Dean didn’t hear it over the clunk of his boots as he jogged after Cas.


	5. Big Man Downstairs

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's finals week for me, so I apologize for the late posting but after that I'm out of classes so I'll be able to post longer, more frequent chapters. This one is the longest and has been my favorite to write so far!
> 
> Also, I think these terms are self explanatory, but I'll mention them anyway for clarity.  
> Expoticum - Universal healing ointment  
> Ignaparum - Universal weapon  
> Dryad - Airplane, like a drone  
> The Anarch - Underground anarchist organization  
> Dreck - the valley where Dean and Sam live  
> Aether - the city where Castiel is from

Dean was beginning to get exasperated at Cas constantly vanishing, Dean always having to find him. So when he pushed the heavy tarp door out of the way and squinted in the sunlight to find which direction Cas had gone, he was surprised to find the form beneath the tan trench coat slumped against the tin wall just to the left of the door. For once, Cas wasn’t running away. Maybe he just needed some fresh air. Dean was hesitant to say anything; Castiel’s head was bowed beneath his arm and Dean couldn’t see his face.

“I’m sorry…if I pried to much,” Dean ventured.

“Stars. We were named after stars.” Cas was muttering more to himself than Dean.

Castiel looked up then with an unnamable intensity in his eyes. He put the back of his hand to Dean’s forehead like he’d tried to before. Dean flinched back but didn’t push his hand away when it came toward him again. Dean huffed a sigh. Of course Cas realized he didn’t want Sam to know he was sick, but now that they were out of Sam’s sight, he was going to hover. Dean didn’t understand Cas’ deal with playing doctor, but decided he would humor him. Until he saw Cas reach into his deep coat pocket and pull out two pills and a blue latex glove with a rubber band around the opening.

“Cas, what the hell?” He stopped him by grabbing his wrist.

“You wouldn’t let anyone help you. I took matters into my own hands.”

“You stole from a hospital! They already have enough trouble getting supplies, Cas. You can’t,” Dean was muffled by Cas’ hand over his mouth.

“Dean Winchester. They would have treated you themselves if you hadn’t been so stubborn. I took what I could when no one was looking and you will let me administer what little help I can offer or I will march back in there and tell your brother what state you were in this morning.”

Dean’s body betrayed him in the absolute worst moment and convulsed in a coughing fit. Castiel grabbed him with his thumbs on the inside of Dean’s elbows and spun him around so his back was to Castiel's chest, like it had been when they first met. He felt cool hands on the side of his neck and then a slight pressure at the vein beneath his jaw where his pulse was strongest. He could feel through Castiel’s skin that his blood pumped way too fast and he tried inconspicuously to slow it while Cas counted the beats. Dean surrendered to whatever Cas was doing so that he wouldn’t tell Sam, but he wasn’t pleased. He knew Cas had no prior knowledge of human-to-human medical care and silently commended him for picking up everything he’d seen Jess do to Sam the last few days.

Castiel’s hands dropped from his neck and he felt him shuffle closer until his form was pressed into Dean’s back. Cas’ arms hooked up under Dean’s and rested on his chest. He froze, forgetting to breathe, wondering what on earth this was. It was too stiff and calculated to be a hug.

“Breathe in deeply,” said Cas and Dean could feel his breath against his ear. He physically restrained his body from shivering. His gasp, on the other hand, he couldn’t contain. Luckily, Cas had just asked him to breathe, so it made for a good excuse. Dean felt Cas turn his head to the side and press his ear to the hollow beneath one of Dean's shoulder blades, listening to the rattling in his lungs. _He's only checking your breathing_ , Dean thought to himself, _so breathe._ He was getting a makeshift medical exam, standing outside of the hospital under the sparse shade of a tree, and yet it felt uncomfortably intimate.

Cas dropped his hands and stepped back. Dean took a moment to turn around but when he did, Cas was holding his hand out with two red pills in his palm.  
“They are fever reducers,” he said, matter of fact.

“You don’t need to baby me, Cas,” Dean chided.

“Being taken care of when you refuse to take care of yourself is not the same as babying,” said Cas. Something shifted in his facial expression and his head tilted in that way that Dean had come to know as ‘I’m-looking-straight-at-your-soul’. 

“What’s the matter?” Cas took the step between them back, his eyes searching. “You don’t think you deserve to be saved.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement and it was indisputable.

Dean tried, he really did, to think of a sarcastic comeback to that. To get him out of the clutches of those blue eyes that knew him. That, in such a small amount of time, seemed to know the demons that festered in his mind, always. And that saw there, in those ugly horrible things, something that deserved salvation. They stood in the valley where, everywhere he looked, things had been reclaimed and rebuilt. They stood outside of a hospital where lives were saved by selfless people who never turned anyone away. And Dean was dumbfounded by this man in front of him with his stupid squint and his stupid coat and his stupid boots who saw a piece of precious metal amidst a toxic pile of garbage. And it was Dean.

He cursed his sickness, walking pneumonia or whatever, for happening now of all times. His lips quirked up and he opened his mouth to make a comment that would shrug off all the heat he felt under Castiel’s gaze, but nothing came out. The place on his chest where those hands had been was buzzing beneath his skin. He swallowed.

Dean tried desperately to still his shaking hand when he finally picked the pills out of Castiel's palm and tossed them in his mouth. Cas looked smug watching him. He untied the rubber band from around the rubber glove inside of which, he had poured some antibiotic cream. Dean nearly protested again – that crap was expensive and hard to find – but he reminded himself of Cas’ threats earlier and shut his mouth.

Cas peeled the cotton of his shirt sleeve over the burn and Dean gritted his teeth together. He looked away, knowing it was probably gross and bubbly. Castiel’s fingers felt cold and soothing and it was heavenly relief to the pain he’d been doing his best to ignore for days. Dean let his head fall onto his opposite shoulder and let out some of the tension that wound inside him.

When he felt Cas’ nimble fingers rolling and tucking his sleeve up to his shoulder, he opened his eyes again. Cas swiped his hands on his trench coat.

“All better?” Dean asked with a smirk, finally able to find his humor shield.

“You need to drink an abundance of water and get more sleep.”

“Alright Doc, you might be as bad as Sam, you know.” Dean clapped his hand on Castiel’s bicep, the only way he knew to say ‘thank you’. “We’re gonna go see a friend of mine before we have another slumber party.”

Castiel obliged and didn’t ask any questions. Dean wouldn’t have told him anyway, but he had a plan to test Cas. First, he’d take him to the most trustworthy person he knew and a pretty damn good judge of character. Dean knew at this point that he trusted Cas more than anyone in his right mind would trust a rogue Sentry. But he also knew that his reasoning might be entirely skewed. If he could survive Bobby's scrutiny, he just might make it in the valley.

 

X

 

The walk to Dean’s ‘friend’s’ house was long and quiet, aside from Dean occasionally pointing to something and telling a story about him and Sam as kids. The day was pleasant and Castiel reveled in the air. By then, he’d gotten used to the metallic twinge and the dust flurries and the occasional rancid smell of garbage. He just enjoyed being outdoors, open, no grid beneath his feet, no Audium humming idly in his ear. 

They eventually came to a creek bed. They crossed it and on the other side it was far more secluded. The clanking noises and many smells eventually faded until Castiel wasn’t sure how far they were from the bustling Salvage. Dean’s friend must live a rather reclusive lifestyle, Castiel thought. After dodging their way through closely grown trees and detangling brambles around their shoes, they came to a clearing. There were small rust-covered fence posts around the clearing with barbed wire twisted between them. Dean stepped one leg over the lowest strand of wire and ducked under the highest one. Castiel followed his lead. There were giant metal structures scattered all throughout the clearing. Castiel inferred that they must have been shells of old vehicles but they looked vastly different from the ones of Aether. They had giant black wheels and they were big and he couldn’t quite figure out the shape of them. He followed Dean through the labyrinth of old cars to a humble little two story bungalow in the middle. It was similar to Dean’s only more put-together; it had real glass windows, though some had boards nailed across them. It was painted a faint pastel blue but the color was faded and chipped in some places.

Dean angled his body in front of Castiel’s almost in a protective manner and knocked on the threshold of the wooden door. When it creaked open, a middle aged man wearing a strange billed hat and seated in a chair with wheels opened the door. He glanced suspiciously between him and Dean and then combed his eyes down Castiel to his boots.

“What did you do, boy?” he hissed. The man grabbed Dean’s shirt and pulled him inside the house, slamming the door in front of Castiel, still standing on the porch. He could hear them yelling inside the door.

“What have you done, you stupid ass! That’s a Sentry!” he heard the man bellowing on the other side of the thin wooden panels.

Dean’s reply was much more difficult to hear and he could only catch certain words like ‘saved’ and ‘Sam’ and ‘trust.’

The door opened again just as the man was turning and wheeling away, shouting “balls!” Castiel assumed that meant he wasn’t happy with his presence but Dean stood with the door open waiting for him to cross the threshold into the house, so he did.

“Bobby, this is Cas,” Dean gestured awkwardly. “Cas, Bobby.”

Bobby grumbled in response and Castiel stayed silent, opting not to correct Dean about his proper name. 

The house had a musty, stale smell but it was far more pleasant than the Salvage. There were more books than Castiel had ever seen stacked all around the room and on shelves lining the walls. Framed paintings hung on many surfaces and an ornate rug covered most of the wooden floor. It was dark inside with subdued light filtering in through the fabric curtains and illuminating the dark reds and warm browns. The textures of the house were well-worn and homely. Based on the simple, non essential items scattered about, Castiel could infer that this house stood before the war.

Bobby rolled himself back into the room with a large glass of water in one hand. He looked Castiel in the eye as he slid the glass towards Dean.

“What’s this?” Dean asked.

Bobby’s eyes stayed trained on Castiel as he addressed Dean, “I know when you’re under the weather, boy.”

Dean scoffed.

“Drink.” Castiel and Bobby both said simultaneously, turning to glare at Dean before he could dismiss them with assurances that he was fine.

Dean rolled his eyes melodramatically and raised the glass to his lips.

Castiel could remember Dean telling him about someone losing their legs in an accident on the fences. He put two and two together that Bobby was that man. He wore pants but they were tucked beneath him somewhere around his knees. He also wore a button down shirt in the same cross-hatched print as the one Castiel borrowed.

“So you’re a ghost now?” Bobby asked Castiel pointedly.

“I cannot return to Aether, if that’s what you’re asking,” he replied.

“Unless you turn in the boys.”

Dean looked to Bobby then with offense.

“I know the drill. You can go back just fine with Sam and Dean in shackles. Probably get a promotion for it. So tell me why I shouldn’t blast you with rock salt right now,” Bobby said, his volume increasing as he spoke.

It was Dean who stood up and responded before Castiel could explain himself.  
“If he was gonna do that, don’t you think he would have by now?”

The silence was long as the two stared each other down. The air was charged with their conflict and Castiel felt guilty to have caused it. He knew Dean had said he didn’t talk to his family much because of something about elephants. It must have been the elephant he was feeling.

“Yes,” Bobby finally said, simply and much calmer. “You got your Audium on you?”

“It malfunctioned in the explosion,” Castiel explained.

“You may not be able to use it anymore but it can still be tracked. If you’re not going back, you destroy that thing. Turn it to dust.”

Castiel had never heard of Audiums being tracked outside of the grid but he didn’t want to dispute Bobby.

“Alright boys, I don’t want to know anything more than I have to. That’s best for everyone in this circus. But if you trust Cas here, I guess I have to. Your father would rip you a new one, you know.” Bobby said.

“Yeah well if he was here, he might not need to,” Dean’s jaw widened with the clenched muscles around his mandible.

“Sam’s alright?” asked Bobby.

Dean scrubbed a hand over his face and laughed humorlessly.

“He’s fine now. Had a pretty big tear but he got a girlfriend to fix him up, apparently. He’s volunteering as a healer now,” there was a certain pride to Dean’s voice but also something ominous that Castiel couldn’t place. Why would Dean not be pleased with Sam’s new-founded relationship? Jess had seemed so agreeable.

“Ellen told me about Jo,” Bobby said in a gentle voice and laid a hand on Dean’s forearm. He shrugged it off and Castiel knew the look on his face to be shame. He wished he could take it away.

“That ain’t your fault, you hear?”

The moment seemed tender and although Castiel had never had a father figure, he had observed father-son interactions and knew that Bobby filled that role.

Castiel took the time that they were speaking to get closer to the books and read their spines. He picked up one and looked at the fuzzy layer of grey dust that coated the border. He ran his finger through it and found that the edges of the pages were gold as were the letters across the leather binding. _Brave New World_.

He pinched some pages between the pad of his thumb and index finger and watched the ink blur as he flipped through. He stopped on a random page and scanned the words in fascination. His eyes fixated on one line that seemed to pound from somewhere behind his ribs as if the words themselves were etched there. He peeked over his shoulder and heard two voices coming from a distant room so he quickly ripped the passage from the page and tucked it into the inside pocket of his trench coat.

He scoured the other books on the shelf before him and found a version of the same book Dean had told him about before; the Bible. His fingers traced the title fondly but it only served to remind him that he had to leave. He was a warrior. That’s all he’d ever been. A protector. And if he couldn’t protect the only person he’d ever consciously chosen to protect, he was nothing.

He’d been clinging to the excuse that Dean was sick all day but the sickness was dwindling very quickly and he would have no other justification for staying. He cursed himself for looking, desperately, for another reason. One more night in that cabin, one more day with the green of the valley and the green of those eyes. But alas, he knew the only right thing was to leave. Now, with Bobby’s suspicion that his Audium could be remotely tracked by someone in Aether, he felt the urgency return. He couldn’t linger in Dean’s life any longer than necessary and every minute, his company became less necessary and less safe. Castiel had no clue what lie beyond the valley in the wasteland but he’d rather be there than for Dean or Sam to be in confinement underground.

Castiel tuned back in to the murmuring voices and followed them to the yellow tiled room he took to be the kitchen. Dean and Bobby were speaking softly, huddled over what appeared to be a large paper map spread across the tabletop.

“She’ll be here somewhere,” Bobby said, dragging a finger across a section of the map.

“Maybe we can beat some info out of Crowley,” Dean was saying as Castiel approached behind him quietly and looked over his shoulder at the map. He sucked in a breath of air and Dean spun around.

“Christ, Cas. Don’t sneak up on me like that.” Dean was sacrificing his personal space to place himself deliberately in between Castiel and the map on the table, but he ducked around him. He’d already seen. He knew that map.

It was the Aether fence system, the Garrison, and the underground. Castiel had no idea how they acquired this information but it was not a map that came from Aether. It was hand drawn on a strange thick, translucent paper but remarkably accurate.

Castiel gave Dean a stormy expression.

“Dean. You can’t go down there.”

Dean shook his head minutely and his lip twitched menacingly. “Like hell I can’t, Cas. She’s in there ‘cause of me. I’m getting her out.”

Castiel knew what happened to non-citizens when they were captured and taken to the underground cells. He could never let that happen to Dean. He would do anything, including lie. So lie he did.

“She’s dead, Dean. They capture prisoners, give them twenty-four hours to tell the truth and then lethally inject them. If they haven’t come for you by now, it means she didn’t give them information. She’s gone. I am sorry.”

Castiel knew they didn’t lethally inject prisoners. What they did was worse. Dean’s friend Jo would be in the underground begging for death. But Castiel knew the high security there. He was one of the highest ranked Sentries in all of Aether and he still hadn’t been below ground himself. He was engulfed by his lie, felt he would suffocate with it, but he could not allow Dean to go after her. He had grown and prospered in a land that tortured humans under the pretense that they were traitors who threatened the safety of Aether, and he’d believed it until he’d met Dean, who only wanted to provide for his family and community. He had trusted Aether to be the utopia it claimed to be.

Dean’s chin trembled and he went very pale, his eyelids flickering with the sting of tears. Castiel registered then that Dean had mentioned his father disappearing as well. He’d just informed him that his father was dead, as well. Castiel never meant to cause this much grief, only to protect Dean the only way he knew how. He steeled himself and decided this was better than Dean trying to infiltrate the underground. He had to look away.

Bobby grabbed Dean by the elbows firmly. “Look at me, boy. This isn’t your fault. You don’t blame yourself, you hear?” Castiel could hear the hurt in Bobby’s voice as well but he was grateful that Bobby was there to tell Dean these things when Castiel couldn’t face him.

Dean whipped himself from Bobby’s grip and walked swiftly out the front door, slamming it behind him. Castiel stood silently in the kitchen with Bobby for a few moments before he heard a metallic crunching sound and glass shattering.

Castiel and Bobby nodded at one another before he followed Dean out of the house. Dean was leaned over the hood of a black car, bracing himself on locked elbows and breathing laboriously. Castiel wanted to comfort him but he couldn’t bring himself to do so when he had caused this. He wasn’t sure he knew how to comfort another person, regardless. He stood silently behind Dean and stared at his boots, battling in his mind every second to tell Dean the truth. But every second, the part of him that wanted to keep Dean from the hands of experimenters overpowered the part of him that wanted to stop Dean’s guilt and self-loathing. That was something Castiel could never heal but at least he could keep him alive. He couldn’t bring himself to regret the decision.

When Dean spoke, his voice was dangerous and rough.

“Can I trust you, Cas?”

Castiel’s heart faltered. Did Dean somehow know? He said nothing in response and Dean turned to face him. The danger in his voice was there on his face, too. Dean had never looked terrifying to Castiel but in this moment, he thought that all his combat training couldn’t stand against Dean’s raw wrath. He radiated with it.

“Are you with me or not?” Dean pressed.

“Of course,” Castiel said in the most reassuring voice possible. If he couldn’t ease Dean’s grief, the least he could do was ensure that Dean knew he would never bring harm to him. Dean internalized his fury and Castiel almost wished Dean would take it out on him instead.

“Then we’re going to see Crowley.”

 

Some considerable distance outside of the Salvage, Castiel trailed Dean into an old warehouse building. He went into an inconspicuous room and opened a small door leading to an even smaller closet. Dean motioned for Castiel to step inside and he obeyed, unsure of why Dean was putting him in a dark, confined space. Dean stepped inside after him and closed the door. They were pressed together at the shoulders.

“Whatever happens, you do not mention that you are from Aether. Ever,” Dean warned him. Castiel nodded in confirmation but it was too dark for Dean to see.

“Capiche? You tell them you’re from the city, you’re dead.”

“I capiche,” Castiel replied, still utterly confused about their location and purpose.

Dean opened a small panel from the wall to reveal a compound gear system with a handle. He began cranking the handle and the walls moaned and rattled. The floor began to lower and they sank down into the earth with every turn of Dean’s arm. Castiel immediately began to panic. They were going underground. They were still outside of Aether city limits but he didn’t know how far out the tunnels went.

“Dean! We can’t go – they’re – it’s dangerous, stop!”

“Shhh, hey, hey. This is Crowley’s territory. Trust me, there’s none of your kind where we’re going.”

“Where exactly is that, Dean?”

“The Anarch. No one hates Aether more than these guys.”

“Why are you taking me here?”

“We’re gonna get some information,” Dean said but the response was too cryptic to satisfy Castiel’s unease.

“I gave you all the information you need, Dean. There’s nothing more to be done.”

“We can make them pay,” the rage in Dean’s voice was still there and it was making Castiel increasingly anxious, feeling the tempest rolling off of Dean. It was desperation for justice or retribution but Castiel knew that those things clouded judgment. Dean would get himself killed with revenge motives; rule number one of combat was to leave one's emotions out. Maybe Castiel had sparked an even bigger fire than the one he had tried to smother. Dread pooled in his stomach as the walls around them screeched and Dean’s arm stopped turning the lever.

Dean knocked on the metal door with a specific rhythm. Castiel memorized it out of habit. He was fully alert and he realized how severely he’d let his guard dissolve before. The door opened and a petite girl with sharp brown eyes and a mischievous expression opened the door.

“Well, well, well. Dean Winchester descended to hell,” she crooned in a musically sweet voice. “And who’s this?”

“Castiel,” he said but didn’t hold his hand out like he usually would. She carried herself in a sinister way despite her small frame.

“Here to see the big man downstairs?” she quirked her head to the side and raised an eyebrow.

“Cut the crap, Meg,” Dean interjected. “Take us to him.”

One side of her mouth raised and she looked back at Castiel appraisingly, predatory. She turned on her heel and began walking down a long corridor. It was lined with cages and within those cages: savage canines of substantial size snarling and drooling. Meg tutted at them and they retreated back to the shadows of their enclosures. 

Dean leaned over and informed Castiel in a low voice, “they call them Hellhounds. They’re the guard dogs. Spare a thought for the cruel treatment but they’re too far gone now. They’re killing machines.”

Meg pulled out a key and slid it into a massive deadbolt on a door. Larger than a standard door, it was more accurate to say the entire wall slid open to reveal a dark concrete room within. Dim yellow lights buzzed in the corners. Castiel looked for the generator powering the lights but saw none. The room was nearly empty except for an old wooden desk placed right in the middle. Behind the desk, an astonishingly short man was poised, looking even more menacing than Meg.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” he said and his accent was one that Castiel couldn’t place. “How can I help you and, more importantly, how can you help me?”

“Jo Harvelle. She was taken. Can you get me in?”

Castiel felt bile rising. Surely it wasn’t possible for this anarchist organization to know whether or not Jo was still living or who had captured her. Surely it wasn’t possible for them to help Dean get through the underground. He’d done everything to ensure that Dean wouldn’t try to get to her and it was in vain. Castiel couldn’t protest because doing so might give away his previous status. He forced himself to stay composed as a warrior would and think. Hard.

He stepped forward in front of Dean, cutting him off. “My name is Jimmy,” he said, using an alias in case this Crowley knew about Aether’s Sentry name patterns. He pulled the strips of silver from his pocket and laid them across the desk.

“Pure silver from a Sentry uniform.”

Crowley studied him. “Where on earth did you get this?” He looked at Castiel’s boots and then back up at him, skeptical.

“Stole them,” he said, shortly, trying to sound as relaxed and confident as possible.

“And you want?”

“I want the names of the men who took Jo, the names of any one who laid a hand on her. Can you tell me that?” Castiel asked. He knew the names of the men he was with that night and he knew the names of the few people who had access to the underground but he needed a diversion. Castiel stole a look at Dean who still stood well behind him. He picked up one of the silver strips again and held it in his left hand, waving it close to Crowley’s face, making sure it caught his full attention. With his right hand, he swiped the pen from Crowley’s desk and slid it into his pocket.

“Come back tomorrow. I keep these,” he said, snatching the silver from Castiel’s hand. It was a compromising position of inferiority but it would have to suffice. He was angry with Dean for not telling him the plan, that he still intended to sneak into Aether’s underground chambers, but he would not forfeit. He could not let Dean succeed in this suicide mission. And worst of all, he could not lay any blame on Dean. As immensely frustrating as he found Dean, he saw nothing but bravery in Dean's relentless efforts. Castiel had sworn to protect citizens of Aether, but he'd never known anyone more worthy of his oath than Dean. “I can tell you something, though. A gesture of good faith," Crowley said.

Dean approached then, crossing his arms over his chest. Castiel took advantage of the fact that Dean’s attention was on Crowley to pull the ripped piece of paper from his pocket and press it to the side of the desk, just hidden under the lip of the top piece of wood. He pulled the pen out and jotted a note sloppily.

“Sunrise tomorrow, need hellhound,” he wrote.

He shoved the paper into his pocket and wrapped it around one last bar of silver he hadn’t given to Crowley. When he looked up, he caught the last few words of whatever Crowley had said to Dean.

“…in the waste land, about fifty miles due east.”

Ideally, Castiel would have been listening to what was being said but his heart and mind raced, scrambling in attempt to reroute his strategy. He had been planning to stay one more night and then, if he was sure Dean was no longer ill, he would make his way east and disappear. Now, he knew if he left, there was nothing he could do to prevent Dean from getting into Aether. Everything had to be re-calibrated.

Dean nodded his head at whatever Crowley had told him.

“Goes by the name of Anna,” Crowley said. 

Castiel stilled at that. He once knew someone called Anna. Anael, formally, but she preferred the epithet. It was a common name, however, and as far as he could tell, they were talking about another anarchist commune to the east, entirely unrelated to his Anna. If Dean went east, that would be tolerable to Castiel. The further from Aether, the better. He knew Dean was capable enough to survive in whatever hostile environment waited beyond the valley.

“Tomorrow at high noon. I’ll have your names.”

Dean didn’t afford Crowley any goodbye and neither did Castiel. They left the way they came, Castiel behind Dean. When Meg escorted them, he tugged her arm as discretely as possible. Dean stalked towards the moving closet, unaware. He slipped the silver fragment with the paper wrapped around it into the pocket of Meg’s tight leather jacket and winked at her. Castiel knew it probably looked absurd – he’d never winked at anyone in his life. But he’d seen it done and it was his attempt to convey to Meg that he wanted her to stay silent. She looked bemused but, thankfully, didn’t expose him.

As she shut the metal closet door on them, Meg winked back at Castiel.

“See ya, Clarence,” she trilled.

He wasn’t sure if she’d forgotten his name or used a different one intentionally. Either way, he was grateful that she didn’t use the Sentry name he’d given her previously.  
As Dean opened the panel and began winding the gears to lift them back up, he stood in quiet reverie deciding whether or not to scold Dean for this. He was furious, but he thought better than to display it. Dean hadn’t known. It was Castiel’s own fault for lying to him. Every moment with Dean was mercurial and unpredictable. Despite his incessant attempts to stay one step ahead as he'd always been taught, Dean could strip his every preconception and flip the board without any effort. Castiel resolved to use the last hours he had with Dean wisely and without undeserved resentment towards him, to let go of it all as he'd have to let go of Dean come morning. And this time, there was no alternative. 

His thoughts went to the slip of paper that now sat curled in Meg’s pocket. He tore it from Bobby’s book because he had wanted to keep it for himself but he needed a way to relay his message. He could still recall the passage that had captivated him so forcefully and it echoed in every hollow of his body.

_"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."_


	6. Constellations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Featuring a Castiel who can't take hints, a Dean who can't give hints, and a Sam and Jess who are starting to catch on. Also, a little angst.

_"For the shield may be as important for victory, as the sword or spear." _  
\- Darwin, _Origin of Species___

If anything could soothe the rage that simmered just below boiling point in Dean, it was knowing that he had a plan; that soon, he’d be able to kick some ass and take some names. They had to wait a full day to return to Crowley for information and until then, they’d just have to idle. Dean hated being idle, and Crowley was sketchy but there was nothing he could do except for wait. See if Crowley held up his end. If he didn’t, Dean was positive he would be taking all the rage out on Crowley himself. Crowley probably knew that, too. Dean Winchester may have had a reputation in the valley as someone not to cross.

For the time being, he just needed to get away from the dirt and the dusty haze and the metallic taste on his tongue. It felt like it coated his lungs and it didn’t help that he was still wheezing at the top of his breath. His body was so weary and ache-y but he was far too restless to sleep it off. It was one of those days that he would have ducked off into the woods, his own little sanctuary, to just inhale. To finally breathe something clean and pure and let go of the filth that clung to every facet of his life, making skin gritty and water rusty and eyes burn.

But he had Cas with him. His little slice of heaven in the forest was not a place he usually brought people but he couldn’t exactly pass Cas over to Sam again now that Sam had his hands full at the hospital. He supposed he could leave Cas in his cabin alone and tell him he had some business to tend to. He trusted Cas enough for that even if he still knew that he shouldn’t. So why was Dean so apprehensive about leaving Cas behind?

There was a slow insidious explanation crawling its way out of cobwebs in Dean’s mind, slinking into clarity. _Because you want him with you. You want him to stay._ Dean wanted to ignore it. He also wanted to watch Cas’ face when he laid eyes on the drooping garland and moss-covered trees, the impossible colors and the unpolluted water. The place held everything Dean had ever wanted like a teaspoon, a little basin of untainted earth. He wasn’t even close to comfortable with confronting why he might want Cas there, too.

But Cas had seen so much ugliness in the valley, the scrawny kids making mud pies and the rubble from the war in piles and the smog. The smog that coated every damn thing in a layer of grey grime. Dean wanted Cas to see the good things, too. Dean Winchester’s best kept secret. It felt like exposing a raw nerve to do so but, if he was honest, that was something Cas had made him feel for days. Like laying his arms down while still being pelted by enemy fire. His touch was infuriating and his gaze was dizzying and his mere presence….

Cas was always so calculated and deliberate in his every movement. The few times Dean had gotten a spontaneous reaction out of him, it had been negative. Still, it was like fresh air, seeing those eyes _feel_ something. Seeing those hands tremble. And when Cas had shaken Dean awake, awkwardly straddling his bed, with some irrational fear that Dean was gonna croak, Dean woke to a face that bore every emotion. Relief and panic, entirely unrefined. It transformed Castiel’s entire being.

Dean felt like he kept accidentally making little hairline fractures in Castiel’s composure and each time what came seeping out was thick and broody and bitter. Like inside Cas, nothing but storm clouds. But Dean knew better. He knew better than anyone that storm clouds produced lightning, power, pure energy. Maybe that was what drew him in: the same thing that got him out of bed in the middle of the night, the same thing that sung in his veins when he stood vulnerable under a furor of clouds, leaned against the gale force winds, turned his face up to the pelting rain and waited expectantly for one instant of brilliance. He wanted to fracture Cas’ control and he wanted to coax out a bolt of brightness; harness it like only he could. Maybe it would come in the form of a smile or a gasp, laughter or a single muttered word.

Dean only knew that when he felt like everything had slipped from his grasp, it was too dark to navigate, it was too heavy to carry, he would go to his little pocket in the woods. And he knew of anyone who felt an utter loss of control right now, it was the misplaced Sentry who saved his life, who couldn’t go home, who had been fed from a silver spoon and then shed of all his luxury in one night. Dean’s logic tried to barricade him from making this decision but it held no weight. He wanted to take Cas. He wanted to see the blue of the lake, the blue of the sky without the dome of fog. He wanted to compare that blue to a certain shade that may or may not match Castiel’s eyes.

When the elevator screeched to a halt and his forearm was sore from turning the lever to raise them from the underground, he turned to Cas, poised to say something about showing him a secret. He felt like he was five years old again, snickering under his breath, saying _no peeking_. But when he looked at Cas, his jaw was clenched and there was a grim set to his mouth. Something was wrong.

Cas had been so badass down there, taking matters into his own hands, peacocking the side of him that was used to being obeyed. Dean had almost just stood back and watched. Cas had seemed like he was all in, balls to the wall, about Dean’s plan. Dean was prepared to offer Crowley nearly anything for information but Cas had taken the wheel and pulled out an entire cache of silver from his stupid trench coat.

Dean thought it was Cas proving to him that he was instrumental to the cause and trustworthy. Now, looking at Cas, there was something in his expression that halted the words right on Dean’s tongue. He stared instead.

Surely Cas could see him boring straight into him in his peripheries, scrutinizing really, but he never turned his head. When the rusty metal door opened on the other side, Cas took the lead and walked straight out of the warehouse from the way they came. He wasn’t stalking away angrily or running or moping. Nothing. Just walking, silently, straight again, expressionless. _Like a soldier_ , Dean thought. _Marching_. He didn’t like it at all, like Cas had gone on autopilot, the glazed over look from their first meeting pasted on his face.

They stepped out of the warehouse and into a patch of sunlight. Dean searched Castiel’s face again, rummaging through his mind for something to say to him, when he stopped short – Cas’ entire expression had shifted. He was, as usual, crowding Dean's personal bubble with the closest thing Dean had seen to a smile yet. It hadn’t quite reached his eyes but it was enough for Dean to wonder if he’d been imagining before.

“What would you like to do for the remainder of the day, Dean?” Castiel asked in a voice as sunny as the damn sky. It would have been relieving to Dean if he hadn’t been so sure that something was awry only moments before.

“Wh – uh…” Dean stuttered, contemplating whether or not he should bring up the looming mood that was apparently gone now. Castiel just continued to look at him expectantly like he had no clue why Dean was staring at him with his brows stitched together, his bottom lip moving like it had something to say, but silent. Dean finally shook himself out of it. Why dampen the day?

He cleared his throat, feeling like moths were beating their wings against the walls of his lungs. Cas didn’t know how personal it was for Dean to take him to his spot in the woods, and he never needed to know. It would just be another normal outing, an extra stop on the tour of the valley.

“Yeah, there’s one more place I can show you,” Dean said, looking down and stubbing the toe of his boot in the dirt. “I mean, if you want. If you’re not, you know, tired or bored or –“

“I’d like that, Dean,” Castiel said. Dean looked up to see nothing but pleasant encouragement on Cas’ face. He’d definitely been imagining things earlier.

 

Dean could hardly keep the corner of his mouth from turning up the entire walk out of the Dreck and into the more secluded part of the valley. Of course, he’d deny it to his grave. He was just excited to finally get some fresh air, that’s all. He’d occasionally mumble something like, “almost there,” or “watch your step here,” but Cas never responded. When Dean looked back, Cas was always craning his neck to look up at the towering trees or listening with a crooked ear to a bird’s song.

When Dean heard the sound of babbling water and the ground began to feel spongy under his feet, he knew they were close. They made it to a cliff side swaddled in deep green moss and Dean looked for the landmark; a divot in the earth where a small rill of water cut through the limestone and ran down the rocky cliffs in rivulets. Just to the other side of the little stream, a substantially sized tree trunk clung right to edge of the drop-off. It looked like it could be pushed over with a breath of wind but, in fact, it was sturdy enough to wedge a foot in the protruding roots and climb down where, beneath a net of roots and moss, there was a semi-flat ledge at the mouth of an indention in the cliff. It couldn’t really be called a cave; it was more like a little nook where the water had carved into the rock. It wasn’t a huge drop from the ledge to the bottom of the valley. The water pooled about ten feet down and then from there it was just a gradual slope into a lake below. The jagged mountains in the distance all came together in this little basin, the ridges dividing up the land like fingers on a hand that cupped the clear water in its palm.

Dean didn’t bother saying anything to Cas when he climbed down the little ladder of roots and into their shadow. He knew Cas would follow and Cas was, if anything, more deft on his feet than even Dean. He went to press his palm to the cool grey stone like a greeting. He heard the light patter of Castiel’s feet hitting the ground when he hopped down from the stone and when Dean turned around, Cas was inches from his face. Dean reeled back but there wasn’t much space to do so. He pressed his shoulder blades into the knobbly wall behind him and tried to look anywhere but Cas’ eyes. His hand came up to rest just below the hinge of Dean’s jaw. Dean thought for a second, heart racing, that this was some sort of gesture of fondness. Was Cas making a pass?  Then he felt Castiel’s steady finger tips press harder into his pulse point.

He closed his eyes and exhaled, trying to match the collected expression on Cas’ face. Once again, he thought with gall, he’d nearly gotten all hot and bothered when Cas was only checking his vitals. It was maddening, the way his body responded to the vicinity. He knew better than to write it off as ‘haven’t-gotten-laid-in-a-while’, but he’d be damned if he didn’t try to convince himself of it anyways.

Rather than drop the fingers at his throat, Cas slid his hand down the curve of Dean’s collar and pressed softly at his shoulder to turn him around. There wasn’t much space for Dean to turn between Cas and the wall behind him but he retracted in on himself as much as he could and did everything in his power not to make any further contact with Castiel’s body as he shuffled himself to face the wall. It was close enough that he could lean his forehead against it; despite the cool damp air and the shade, Dean’s face felt like it was burning.

Dean was also grateful to be facing the wall now and not Cas because when he leaned his lower body against the clammy stone as well, the pressure between his legs nearly made his knees buckle. He tensed his entire body against the urge to roll his hips forward, tasted blood in his mouth when he bit down on his lip to stifle what definitely was not going to be a moan.  He swallowed it down and his throat felt thick and bone-dry.

Castiel’s torso was pressed to his back now, his ear to his back to listen to Dean’s lungs again. When the guy spoke, Dean felt that voice of crushed velvet resonate through his spine, could physically feel the vibrations wind down his vertebrae and echo behind his own ribs.

“Breathe,” the body behind him rumbled, although he didn’t need to be told. He was nearly wheezing by then, anyways.

 

X

 

Castiel stood behind Dean with his ear pressed between his shoulder blades again. He’d already taken the tempo of his pulse and it was hurried and irregular. Perhaps Dean was becoming more ill. He thought it could have been because he’d just climbed down the roots and into this little pocket of moss and stone but Dean at optimal health would not become flushed and strained at that level of exertion.

He felt Dean’s entire body tensing in front of him. Dean still didn’t like that Castiel was “babying” him, apparently. He snaked his arms around Dean again to lay them on the other side of his lungs so he could feel for proper expansion or if his ribs still rattled when he inhaled. He felt Dean’s hot breath puffing on his forearms and he heard Dean swallow audibly. Castiel took these all to be signs of Dean’s anger. They’d been walking from location to location all day; Castiel didn’t think it was any cause for anger that he wanted to ensure Dean’s wellness given his condition only a few hours prior, but then again Castiel always had a hard time rationalizing Dean’s actions.

Castiel held still and listened for longer than one breath of Dean’s. He didn’t hear the painful sounds that meant fluid in Dean’s lungs but there was a muted wheezing sound still. He held and held, breathing in the earthy scent that rolled off of Dean’s skin, and Dean wasn’t pulling himself away like he usually would if he was angered.

A moment, a small movement, and then Dean’s thick, calloused fingers curled around Castiel’s wrist. He loosened his joints, expecting those fingers to pry his hands from Dean’s chest. They didn’t. Despite the weathered texture of his hands, the movement was soft and timid.

“So, Cas. Am I gonna live?” Dean said. The cadence of his voice was wrong; it was lower and it wavered, like Dean was speaking underwater. It sounded like it was being dragged from his lips. Maybe his sickness had made his throat sore as well.

Castiel thought of the question. Dean had meant it in regards to his physical health but when he said it, Castiel knew his answer meant more than that. Dean didn’t know it, but Castiel would devote his every atom to make sure that Dean would live. Through this and through everything that would happen after. Through all the uncertainties Castiel faced, the one thing he knew was that Dean would live. The air around them was suddenly sweltering, stifling. Castiel felt a stinging at the root of his nose, just between his eyes, and it was something foreign. It had been too long since Dean’s question but Castiel didn’t trust his voice to reply.

“Yes. You’ll live.” If he thought Dean’s voice wavered, his own was quaking.

He felt Dean’s hushed laughter. The fingers wrapped around his wrist held on but tugged away from Dean’s body as he shifted to turn back around. Castiel took a step back, trying not to falter on his feet, as he remembered that Dean values his personal space. Dean’s one hand remained folded around Castiel’s wrist but the other came up to the lapel on his trench coat. The fabric bunched beneath taut tendons like he might yank Castiel forward or shove him away but he never did either. After a long moment of Dean looking at Castiel and Castiel looking at Dean’s hand, it finally fell at ease, smoothing the creases in his coat collar on its way back to Dean’s side.

There was too much heat and moisture around his body, in the air. Castiel’s doubts and worries and lies hung and draped like the vines above them, they were shoved in every crevice of every surface of every stone. He took a deep breath and shrugged out of his trench coat, spreading it on the floor.

Dean’s eyes followed Castiel as he lowered himself down to sit on the lining of his coat and then he did the same. For a while, they remained in silence and looked out of the hole in the cliff side at the blue lake beneath them and the unfathomably verdant hills beyond that. Here, he could see the beauty of the valley the way he saw it from the Garrison’s windows. In fact, he could see more of it. More closely. Like examining the pores and the wrinkles and the tiny imperfections of the earth the way he couldn’t from so high and so far. He’d thought the valley was ideal before seeing it. Now, he’d seen it’s flaws and it’s sores and somehow it only became more ideal. More alive. He could soak in the green of this place; bask in the flaxen rays that percolated through the tangle of vines above them.

“Talk to me,” Dean said, shifting on his sitting bones.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Castiel replied. “I thought I had. I thought my view of the valley was the best view one could have. Now, in my memory, that view is all grey and cheap.”

Dean smiled, more to himself than at Castiel, with only one side of his mouth. Castiel thought that might have been his favorite smile; the private, self-indulgent one. Then again, he didn’t think he’d ever seen Dean smile the same way twice.

He wanted to collect them all while he could, wrap them in satin and keep them tucked close. It was bittersweet, knowing that by this time the next day, he’d be gone. A traitor to both sides of his life, a deserter.

“How did you find it?” Castiel asked.

“Went wandering around a lot when I was a kid. Stumbled across it. I really couldn’t believe it hadn’t been found. No one’s touched this place since the war. People in the valley don’t really have time to go exploring, I guess.” He looked reminiscent and more relaxed than Castiel had ever seen him. This place was like a refuge to Dean.  
The tactical thing to do here, in their privacy, would be to ask Dean about his plans. Castiel needed to collect as much information as he could before his departure in the morning, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak of his impending betrayal. It felt like poison to Dean’s haven.

“Cas, can I ask you something?”

He only hummed in approval and turned to face Dean, erasing any distress from his face.

“I know I sort of pelted you with questions earlier… Back at the hospital. But really, man, do you know any of the answers? Gabriel, Michael, those guys you mentioned. Are they your brothers?”

Castiel took a deep breath. They were valid questions but the answers gave away a great deal of information about Aether military. He supposed it didn’t matter much now. He was a renegade to both sides of the fence.

“Biologically speaking, they are my siblings. Sociologically speaking, they are just fellow troops of various rank based on performance during our training period.”

“Training period… You mean, childhood?” Dean pressed, incredulous.

“The Garrison is not structured as a family system. We are the military. We serve the citizens of Aether, we do not consider ourselves a part of them.”

“So, what, you breed with yourselves?”

Castiel tried not to look exasperated. He shut his eyes in an effort to locate the proper way to phrase what he wanted to say. If Dean had questions, he would give him answers. But to explain something so ingrained in him in terms that someone unfamiliar with the concepts did not know… It was daunting.

“We are created, not conceived. Many of us take chromosomes from the same donors. Ideal specimens are rare. So they are what you would call brothers and sisters, but not the way that Sam is to you. We have one task, one potential, one goal. Exhibiting doubt or indecision is a sign of a defective creation and is considered a threat to the welfare of Aether.”

Dean made croaking noises, like he wanted to speak but couldn’t. Castiel knew how fond he was of his brother and how inconceivable it all was to him. He turned to face Dean fully. Long shadows dripped across his face from the sharp angles of his cheeks and the dim lighting. He looked tired, the kind that made one’s bones ache. He worried his bottom lip between his teeth and when he let it go, Castiel saw a bead of blood form on the abused flesh.

Castiel reached his hand towards Dean placing it without force on his cheek, his thumb moving to swipe Dean’s lip. Before he could make contact, Dean’s tongue darted out to remove the drop. Castiel pressed the pad of his thumb to the corner of Dean’s mouth instead.

“Please don’t hurt yourself,” he murmured. Dean leaned his face into his palm and brought his hand up to encircle Castiel’s wrist again. He brought Castiel’s hand down and turned it over, examining the deep lines in his flesh like they held the answers he wanted. Castiel would have answered him anything, then.

“You know, the old world named their stars after mythologies that were even more ancient,” Dean said with a soft voice, still looking down at Castiel’s palm that now sat open on Dean’s knee.

“Tell me about them.” Castiel thought of the angels and their ceremony but now realized that they were only one story. The old world was swarming with diverse cultures and, with them, surely diverse folklore.

“Sam’s the one you wanna talk to about that stuff… I’m not good at story telling,” Dean said. He was lying. He knew so many things. Castiel recalled watching Dean become so animated, gesturing wildly, his eyes alight with the descriptions of angels and demons. Regardless, Castiel would have loved to hear Sam’s narrative as well. A more scholarly, technical account. He would never have that now. Would never know Sam beyond what he had gathered: an optimist with a thirst for knowledge and a selfless heart, with a brother who worshipped him, with the most gentle eyes, massive in his stature but not imposing to stand near. Castiel didn’t feel endlessly vexed in Sam’s presence the way he did in Dean’s. Sam’s company was effortless and easy where Dean’s was all friction, push and pull.

“Your version will suffice,” Castiel provided.

Dean just shook his head weakly. “There were a lot of cultures before monotheism came along. They believed in multiple Gods and Goddesses. Everybody had a specialty. Then all the religions fell to one God and anything before that became a story, and then when people started observing the night sky, they named the stars after the old myths. So I guess, after the war, the Gods fell once again, and… The stars are their graveyard.”

Dean never meant to say anything beautiful, Castiel knew, but it always came out that way. Even the most ordinary words fell from Dean’s lips like archaic poetry. It’s the way that a comet is more alluring than a star because it is rare and ebbing.

The sun sank behind the mountains. To the west, Aether would still be doused in light at this time of evening but they were in shadows of a deeper blue. It was still enough to see by and Castiel watched the birds splashing and diving into the glassy surface of water beneath. He was overwhelmed by the arresting peace of this place and the arresting proximity of Dean beside him. More than anything, he was devastated that it would all be ripped away when the sun came back up again. Despite it’s slow descent, it moved far too fast. Castiel wished he could pry it back up with his own two hands, buy just one more day, or reverse time all together.  He wondered if he'd give up even knowing Dean in order for this situation to have never occurred.  For Jo to still be here, for Sam to have not been hurt.  He wasn't sure if he was selfless enough for that, but he wanted to believe he could be.  It mattered little, as reversing the space-time continuum was an impossibility, a dwelling on nonviable solutions only distracted from finding real ones.

“I was a soldier, too, you know,” Dean finally spoke.

Castiel was perturbed at that. The last war was before Dean’s birth and as far as Castiel knew, there was no organized military outside of Aether. He looked at Dean and turned his head to the side in question, but said nothing.

“Not the way you were. But, uh” he cleared his throat and shifted, “after my mom died, I sort of lost my childhood, too. My dad started teachin’ me how to shoot and fight and steal. I learned a lot from him, but it wasn’t the kind of thing I would have chosen for myself. I made sure Sammy got the better end of the bargain. This place was our hideaway, mine and Sam’s. When he needed to just _be a kid_ and play and laugh, this was where he could. I was just Dad's little soldier and I didn’t see it.” His jaw clenched in the tell-tale sign that he remembered something unpleasant and Castiel wished he could soothe the bitterness that twisted his mouth. “Sam did. That’s why him and Dad butted heads so much. When Dad disap – died, I think it was harder on Sammy because they weren’t on good terms.”

Castiel watched every micro-expression, every tick and nuance of Dean. Dean let him in so much just by relaying old memories. He wore every thought on his sleeve. Dean was trying to relate to Castiel, to tell him that he hadn’t really been raised conventionally, either. Castiel was immensely thankful for Sam and Bobby and even Ellen and Jo, whom he’d never met, for being a small little patchwork family for Dean, who felt used and abandoned by his father, but hurt instead for his brother. Dean, who was tender even when he was unbreakable, gentle even in his inexhaustible resilience.

“I came here, too, as a young soldier in training,” Castiel said. It was Dean’s turn to look perplexed, so he kept explaining. “I’d go to the highest window I had access to in the Garrison and I’d look to the east. I’d look at the lush green of this very valley and imagine being here instead.” He thought he heard Dean’s breath hitch. “I ranked in the top of my class so when I was promoted, I requested the sleeping chambers on the highest floor of the Garrison. It has dome windows. I see the valley every day. The colors are so vibrant and real."  He compared the colors in his mind to what he saw before him now, but nothing equated.  "I am most partial to storms, above anything else.”

Dean clapped his hand fully over Castiel’s upward facing palm that still lingered somewhere near Dean, having slipped off his knee. It felt like a charge of electricity transferred through their skin and permeated Castiel’s bloodstream. His tongue felt metallic and suddenly every cell of his body was frantic, trying to escape, trying to burst. He heard his blood rushing in his ears, drowning out the songs of the birds and the soft gush of water down the rocks.

Hinged at the hips and squirming to get his legs beneath him, Dean started leaning towards Castiel. There was so much conflict on his face. Questions and answers and more questions passed through his expression so quickly that Castiel could not keep track. Resentment, hesitation, wonder. He recognized the dissension in Dean’s face as the same he wore when he looked at Jessica; like there was a happiness in him that squabbled with something else far more reserved.

“Ohhh” Castiel exclaimed, pulling back. Realization washed over him and he hadn’t meant to be so expressive but he was so captivated by Dean that his composure absolved. “That’s why you aren’t sure about Jessica,” he said conclusively. He was confident now in his inference.

Where Dean had been rigid moments before, his shoulders and face caved, brows knitted in confusion. “Cas… What?”

“You don’t want Sam to get hurt. He’s already lost so many people close to him. Both of you have.”

Dean’s mouth contorted and he shook his head as if he didn’t understand the language in which Castiel spoke. He continued.

“You’re pleased that he has a companion but weary of the outcome,” Castiel said, matter-of-fact. There was no doubt in his tone, he was certain of himself.

Dean blinked, now completely drawn back to proper posture.

“Yeah. I – I guess so? What does this have to do with…anything?”

Castiel contemplated. _Because I understand you now, Dean,_ he thought. Moreover, he understood the boundless divide between them. Dean refrained from something that Castiel flung himself into; something he knew would inevitably hurt more than he was prepared to acknowledge. Losing Dean would hurt but he was willing to shred that up and toss it away to keep Dean and Sam safe. To give Jo back to them. He knew Dean wouldn’t forgive him for his lies, would never welcome him into his life again, but he had faith that Dean could at least see why he had to do it. Dean was rational and perceptive, regardless of whether or not he was lenient. This was all assuming that Castiel would ever see Dean again. He tried not to think of the bleak likelihood.

“Everything,” Castiel finally responded.

He could see the effort on Dean’s face, trying to comprehend something he couldn’t possibly know, something Castiel couldn’t possibly tell him.

The sky was a dark purple, still faintly glowing pink to the western horizon. Castiel couldn’t see the stars, just beginning to flicker, through the dense canopy of vines above them, but he saw their light reflected in the calm surface of the lake.

He stood and peeled his trench coat up from the ground, shaking it out and slipping into it. Without a word to Dean, he began to climb the roots back up to the surface, knowing he would follow when he was ready. When Dean clambered up behind him and steadied himself on the dewy grass, Castiel gripped his elbow and pulled him close so that their arms and sides were flush. He shifted just enough to stand behind Dean, his chin resting on Dean’s right shoulder, and lined their arms up, extended in front of them. He lifted Dean’s right arm in his, index finger pointing, and wound his left hand around to angle Dean’s chin in the right direction, towards the darkest part of the sky. Closing one eye, he was confident that he had the right view.

He traced a constellation in the sky with his finger multiple times so that Dean could pick out which stars he meant.

“That bright one there, nearly straight up,” he said quietly right into Dean’s ear. He thought he felt Dean shiver. It was getting quite brisk since the sun went down and Dean only wore a t-shirt. He stepped just a few inches closer to Dean at the risk of being reprimanded for invading his personal space so that he could share his warmth.

He drug Dean’s hand down with his to the next star in the constellation. “That reddish one right below it, see?” he said. Dean hummed in response. “And then those three in a row right there… That’s Michael. The sword.”

Dean nodded and Castiel could feel his scruffy jawline against his cheek. So far, Dean hadn’t complained about personal space. He was humoring him. Castiel then shifted them more to the south and pointed at another cluster of stars, starting with the brightest one. “This is Gabriel, the spear,” he traced out the long, thin shape.

His free hand dropped to Dean’s hip and rotated him towards the part of sky in which the moon hung, still low and shimmering, but a thin enough crescent that it didn’t blind the eye to the stars behind it.

“This one’s harder to see,” Castiel said. He followed with his finger the curve of the moon and then went straight up from there, landing on a dim blue hued star. “That’s a blue giant but it’s eclipsed by a white dwarf star.” He felt Dean nodding again just slightly. He then traced a more complex shape out of the cosmos.

“It’s a shield. Do you see?”

“Mhmm,” Dean turned his face towards Castiel whose chin was still settled on his shoulder. The movement only caused Castiel’s nose to burrow in the crook of Dean’s neck. He didn’t pull away. “Whose is that?” Dean asked.

Castiel wasn’t looking at the stars anymore. Dean had turned back to stare past their fingers at the shape above the moon but Castiel let his eyes slide closed, his face still nestled close to musky skin.

“That is Castiel,” it came as nothing more than a whisper.

Dean’s head stayed lifted, watching the subdued blue light dance in the sky for a long time, before he spoke. “A protector,” Dean said. He lowered both of their hands and Dean rotated towards him, forcing Castiel to lift his chin and step away. He kept his eyes closed, still, until he felt a hand card through his hair just above his ear.

“The others were weapons,” Dean said, confirming himself further. Castiel had never thought about that. To him, a shield, a blade, they were all tools for combat. But Dean was correct. One defended, the others assaulted. There were others; Balthazar was a thorn and Uriel was a flame. He couldn’t recall the rest. He mused that most people didn’t know any at all; they were only stars, insignificant to every day life, to anyone who didn’t spend nights staring out their window.

Castiel nodded and looked Dean straight in the eyes. It wasn’t easy. There was something unreadable there and it frustrated him. The green was now a deep emerald from the lack of light but in the darkness of his irises, Castiel saw the stars reflected, the moon curved through his pupil, his pale skin saturated with incandescent light. He wished he had his Audium now so that he could capture the image before him, keep it in his memory chip always and it wouldn’t fade or change.

“Wow,” Dean breathed, breaking Castiel from his tangent. “Never thought I’d see that smile.”

Castiel hadn’t even realized that his lips were turned up so high that his teeth were bared, his entire face flooded with a grin. He pulled his lips back together and pressed them against one another.

Dean chuckled and swiped a knuckle across Castiel’s cheek. He hadn’t had access to a razor in his days in the valley and his facial hair was more prominent than it had been in his life. In the Garrison, it was mandatory to maintain a clean cut and shave. He hadn’t seen himself in a mirror but he could feel the irritation.

“Dean?”

“Hm?”

“I’d like to bathe tonight, if that’s alright,” Castiel said.

If it hadn’t been so dark, Castiel might have insisted that he saw Dean’s cheeks darken. Perhaps bathing was not a subject that was socially acceptable. The last time he bathed in Dean’s cabin, he’d been angry with Castiel for wrongly assuming he had a shower and hot water.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s head home- uh back, to- y’know, the cabin.”

 

Some time later – it was difficult to keep track of time once the sun had set – they lumbered into Dean and Sam’s cabin. Sam was there at the table with Jess who had one leg tucked up into her chest and her chin resting on her knee. They were poring over an old text and Sam had one lanky arm slung around her back.

Dean stopped short in the threshold and just watched. It was unlike him to not say something humorous or inappropriate. Castiel stepped around him.

“Hello Sam. Jess.” He nodded to each of them as he approached.

“Hey, Cas,” Sam said and Jess gave him a warm smile. “We were just arguing over whether or not ginger is the best remedy for severe pain.” He nudged Jess in the ribs and she leaned further into his side.

“You’re enjoying your experience as a healer,” Cas stated.

“Yeah,” Sam glanced around Cas to Dean who still lingered near the doorway, wordless. “Yeah, it’s been really fulfilling if a bit stressful.”

Castiel gave him a tight smile and let his own gaze wander to Dean as well. Sam cleared his throat and greeted Dean with a questioning inflection in his voice.

“Hey Sammy. I was just giving Cas the grand tour of our humble abode,” Dean said with some slightly detectable nervousness in his voice. He neared the table and ruffled Sam’s hair, a gesture Castiel had come to recognize as brotherly affection.

Jessica looked between the three of them with one eyebrow lifted as if she heard something in their conversation that wasn’t being spoken aloud.

“So Sam, since Castiel still needs a place to stay, you’re welcome to stay at my place. You know, since we’re both planning to take the early shift tomorrow,” she says.

“That sounds good,” Sam responds, looking to Dean suspiciously. “After that, maybe we can scrounge up an extra bed, or a hammock.”

Dean just nodded at them with a sheepish smile. “You two have fun,” he said.

Sam rolled his eyes and Jess snickered as she shut the book in front of them and tucked it under her arm. They both stood to say their goodbyes. It was casual, Castiel knew. Sam clapped Dean on the shoulder and Jess simply waved, but Castiel knew this was the last time he would see either of them. He admired them both so sincerely and the only comfort he had in this moment was that Sam and Jess were fortunate to have each other. He thought about Dean having someone like Jess. The thought should have made him feel better; he should have wanted that for Dean, but it only made his abdomen clench, an acrid taste on the back of his tongue.

“See ya, Cas,” Sam called from the door.

“Sam,” Castiel nearly shouted, stumbling forward. Everyone in the room turned to him, taken aback at his urgent tone. He composed himself again. “What is your favorite story in the folklore of the old world?”

He appreciated that Sam actually considered the question seriously. He hadn’t expected any different. Sam smirked as he seemed to sift through possible answers.

“Prometheus. Ancient Greek mythology.”

Castiel nodded at him and smiled very slightly. “Goodbye, Sam.”

They both stepped out into the darkness, leaving the air between Castiel and Dean dense and abrasive. Dean immediately pulled on a soft, well-worn shirt in that same cross square print and then squatted down to kindle the fire.

Meanwhile, Castiel wandered over to the bookshelf and browsed the titles. He ran his fingers through the dust on the spine and smiled to himself when he got to the gap from where Sam and Jess must have pulled their medical text. He looked for anything that mentioned Ancient Greek mythology, taking his time to read the titles and marvel at the textures and differences in the lettering on every spine. Before he was halfway through the first row of books, he felt Dean’s breath down the back of his neck. His arm reached around Castiel and pulled one thick black book from the third shelf down and placed it in Castiel’s hand.

“You’ll find it in here,” Dean said, right against his earlobe. Of course Dean would know that Castiel was looking for the legend of Prometheus, and of course Dean would only inadvertently admit that he knew the titles, placement, and content of every book on these shelves.

“Thank you, Dean.”

He swiped his fingertips over the grainy cover. It wasn’t bound beautifully and plated around the outside with gold like the book at Bobby’s house, but it looked like it had been held and handled many times and that made it just as intriguing. It didn’t feel stiff or make a crackling noise when he opened it like the other one. He read through the first introductory passages but retained little information. Dean had stepped away from him and he could hear shifting noises behind the divider where the bathtub and sink were. Castiel decided selfishly that he wanted to hear Dean’s voice. He didn’t care to read this academically written account of an ancient story. Nothing would ever be as entertaining to him as Dean’s wonderfully flawed stories with stuttered words and grammar slippage and comedic sound effects.

He walked to the other side of the partition and saw Dean kneeling beneath the sink into a basket.

“Dean,” Castiel said.

Dean lifted his head so quickly that he cuffed it on the bottom of the porcelain sink. He winced and Castiel immediately reached to touch his skull. Dean let him but glowered up at him from beneath his eyelashes.

“Tell me about Prometheus,” Castiel requested.

Pulling a plush cloth from the basket beneath the sink and laying it across the counter, Dean pushed up from the floor, smirking.

“I got you a towel. You said you wanted a bath, there’s hot water cooling in there now. You do that first and then I’ll tell you everything you wanna know about the Greeks.”

Castiel was impatient but he did ask to bathe earlier and Dean had nearly concussed himself retrieving a towel for him. He nodded and reached for the towel as Dean ducked around the partition. He heard fabric rustling and thumping on the floor and assumed Dean was changing, slipping off his boots, and climbing into his bed.

He let his trench coat fall in a heap on the floor and unbuttoned Sam’s borrowed shirt. When he began unzipping Dean’s pants, already hanging too low on his narrow hips, he nearly leapt out of his skin. Dean was behind him, looking like he might be sick. He was holding a stack of clothes.

“Uh, here, you can sleep…in these,” Dean mumbled and moved like he was about to set the clothes down in the bath water. Castiel bent and grabbed them from Dean’s hands before they could get soaked. As soon as he did so, Dean darted back to the other side of the room. Castiel heard one long huff as Dean fell to his bed, and then nothing else. He eased his way slowly into the water, its heat almost painful but not quite scalding.

After he dried off and dressed in another combination of Dean and Sam’s baggy clothes, he stepped towards Dean’s bed, excited to hear the myth of Prometheus; to carry the story with him like a memory he never got to make.

Before he could get his voice out, he heard a soft snore from Dean. As much as he would have liked to have heard the story, he didn’t have it in him to wake Dean. He’d been so drained all day. Castiel saw it in the hollows beneath his eyes and the slope of his shoulders. So he padded over to Sam’s bed where he’d dropped the book before and crawled under the tattered quilt. He folded the tired old pillow in half to prop his head up and opened the book to the first page. He only made it to the second paragraph before his hand fell slack and his eyelids dropped shut. Maybe he’d never know.

 

Castiel was thankful that he’d been trained to wake himself on command in the early hours of the morning before dawn. It came in handy with no Audium to beep in his ear. His body protested every movement. As lumpy and stiff as Sam’s bed was, he didn’t think he’d ever slept as soundly in the Garrison as he did here. He moved slowly, deliberately, and as silently as possible to undress and slip into his suit. He would keep his boots off until he’d made it outside so as to not make noise on the wooden boards.

He maneuvered almost robotically in a bleary, dreamlike haze. Once he’d gathered all his belongings, he stood in the center of the tiny cabin, immobile, wishing with ever fiber of himself that he could just turn into clay. It felt surreal, after planning to leave every night of his stay and waking up every morning to change his mind, that this time, he had no choice but to follow through. He ambled quietly to the book case and ran his fingers over the curved spines of the books once again. He let his eyes fall to the dwindling embers in the fireplace. The most strategic thing to do would be to burn down Dean’s cabin, force him to run, stage it to look like Sentries had done it in pursuit of them. He couldn’t even entertain that thought long enough to figure out how he’d do it. He couldn’t take away another place that Dean felt safe. The only home he had.

He picked up the book on Prometheus from the pillowcase on Sam’s bed and held it to his chest as he neared Dean’s form, slumped halfway off the edge of his mattress, lying on his back.

Castiel lowered himself to his knees, slowly, so carefully. He wanted to brush his fingers through Dean’s hair, touch his cheek, just once, just a little bit. But he couldn’t risk waking Dean and ruining everything. He looked at Dean’s hand, splayed out a foot from the bed and relaxed, palm up. There were calluses on all of the tender parts of his palm and finger tips. It was the one place Castiel could touch that Dean wouldn’t feel. His fists clenched and unclenched in the effort to refrain from shaking Dean to consciousness, holding his body against Castiel, begging him to run from here, begging him not to fight. He thought perhaps more than he wanted to beg Dean, he wanted Dean to beg him to stay. He wanted a reason to stay. But he knew that if Dean asked, he would. He couldn't give him that opportunity. Dean hated begging, anyway. He gently lowered his cheek to Dean’s palm, cautious not to apply any pressure.

“Forgive me,” he mouthed inaudibly.

He turned to press his lips into the rift at the base of Dean’s fingers, squeezing his eyes shut. When he pulled away, he saw a tiny drop of moisture on Dean’s hand. Standing back up, Castiel set the book down on the other side of Dean’s sleeping form, picked up his boots, and walked away.

He plastered on his soldier face, the one that never cracked when he took a blow to the stomach, never flinched when a gun was fired. He was Castiel, the Sentry of Aether, all determination and lethal force, and he marched toward the warehouse to make a deal with the people he'd been trained to kill. It made him feel like his organs were nothing but black sludge, corrupt and wicked.


	7. Silence and Dust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will answer a few questions but raise even more. I promise they will all be resolved. Remember why you love slow build and bear with me. :)

It was all cold. Everywhere. There was a warmth once, a fugitive feeling. And with it gone, he wasn’t sure if he’d rather have never had it at all. But Castiel had a reservoir of something black and thick that felt nothing and knew nothing except for fighting, order, and bland discipline. He found it, then, putting one foot in front of the other in the stale morning air just before the sun. He went to that place, severed himself into two parts (the Cas that Dean had taken to the woods, who felt safe in Dean’s cabin, and Castiel, who had mastered the art of deceit and would use it against Dean) and he drowned one of them. The one who prevailed was the soldier who grew to life in a Petri dish and lived for twenty-six years without real companionship. He had been foolish to ever let another part of himself exist. He wasn’t meant for it. It would have never ended in any other way but this; drowning. 

Castiel went to Meg. She called him Clarence. He still didn’t understand the reference. She held a hellhound on a thick, rusty chain wrapped around her hand. It sat tamely at her heel, snarling when Castiel entered the warehouse. She clicked at it and raised a tiny black object from her pocket. Whatever it was, it placated the hound.

“Any chance you’re gonna tell me what you need the pooch for?” Meg crooned.

Castiel shook his head once, stern set to his mouth. He didn’t have the time or the patience for words and he wasn’t sure he could trust himself to open his mouth anyway.  
All he could think was, _it’s cold._ He should have covered Dean with another quilt before he left. He should have added a log to the fire. Did he make sure the door was shut completely? Maybe he should go back. Just to check. But if a soldier had anything to his name, anything of his own, it was his resolve and discipline. He had let it crumble and dissolve for days and all because of Dean. He couldn’t allow it again. It mattered this time.

“Fine. Take this,” she said, handing Castiel the small device from her pocket. “When the hound sees this in your hand, you are God.”

Castiel eyed the device in disgust but didn’t take it. “Pavlov and Skinner. Operant conditioning. This is a torture device.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “Look, Sherlock, you won’t ever have to use it. But you have to take it, otherwise Lassie here will rip to shreds the second you leave my sight. Not that I wouldn’t love that but I have a feeling you’ve already got a few death wishes.” Her eyebrow was arched and she smiled without humor, with curiosity.

He took the chain and the little black box and slipped it into his pocket, careful not to flip the little plastic switch on it. The animal was emaciated with sagging, ashy black skin and sparse hair. It’s legs were slender enough that the bulges of muscle were visible. It had massive jaws that dripped drool and foam and its eyes were now trained on Castiel, droopy and blank and not as intimidating as the rest of it.

Castiel knew that Crowley was an awful man. If he didn’t know by looking at the poor creature, he could see it by the same expression in Meg. She was also thin, as many people in the valley were, but she wore full clothing and the same rabid look of thorny pain. On the few patches of visible skin, faint purple bruised bloomed. Castiel saw a few different once than he had the day before.

He had deliberated on whether or not to recruit Crowley for help in a seemingly impossible task. If anyone in the valley could do it, it was Crowley. Actually, if anyone could, it was Dean and Sam but Castiel refused to let them anywhere near such a foolish, reckless plan.

Stood before Meg, the chain of an imprisoned animal wrapped around one wrist, he watched her turn back to the moving closet. Castiel still hadn’t made up his mind and he calculated about seven seconds before Meg descended underground.

“Tell Crowley,” he began but his throat caught.

Meg pivoted around and raised an eyebrow at him, her eyes glassy. Desperation. That was the look Castiel and Meg both wore on their faces. And maybe they were the only ones who could help each other.

Castiel knew there was a good chance that Crowley monitored her every move so he chose his words carefully. But if, for whatever reason, Crowley didn’t hear, Meg could make her own decision about what to relay.  
“Tell Crowley…the pyrotechnic display on Aether’s Deliverance Day is an ideal time to…” Castiel squinted at her, juggling word choices, “make an impact on the community. Such an explosive evening.” His eyes explored the ceiling suggestively.

He left the warehouse, out into a grey dawn whose bite of cold was deeper than any recent night he could recall, and the entire way to the fences, he silenced his thoughts with a mantra. _Worth it. It’s worth it._

When he reached the towering metal structures at Aether’s city limits, he clipped his Audium back onto his ear. It was uncomfortable and the metal was chilled and it all felt out of place. He flipped it into on position and it immediately began screaming in his ear like the night it first malfunctioned. He had to keep it on so the signal would appear on the screens at the headquarters. The fifteen minutes it took for other Sentries to arrive felt like an eternity. After five, his teeth were gritted painfully, and after ten, he was kneeling in the mud with his hands clutching his hair, rocking back and forth. They found him like that, the hellhound still seated beside him.

 

X

 

_Dean knows he’s dreaming because, although this is his house and this is the scent of his soap, his bathtub is definitely not this big. Not nearly big enough for two grown men. But dreams adapt for optimal conditions and he’s thankful for that because, right now, there’s a beautiful form sunk to the chest in warm bath water and looking across at him through blue eyes. Dark blue, like navy. Or are they lighter? They’re definitely bluer. A shock of black hair is slicked to milky, marble skin that almost glows in the mixture of pale moonlight and golden firelight seeping through the parchment room divider. There was definitely a hole in that. And a hole in the wood slats. And the floor is usually dustier. He feels legs tangled with his own, a ghosting touch, like a warm summer rain that evaporates as it falls, leaving vapor on hot skin. No one speaks but they’re saying everything and Dean understands it all, and he’s so content that he could drown right here. A hand lifts his, thin with defined tendons and veins, softer and leaner than his own, but still substantial and capable. Those hands raise his to the lips they belong to. The lips, full and creased, water collecting at the dip just above them, stubble dusted around them, press a kiss to the center of Dean’s palm. He watches a bead of bath water drop from those eyelashes, clumped together and slick, sultry, onto his hand. It’s the warmest thing in the entire dream – warmer than the water in which he’s submerged – and it feels startlingly real._

_The warm drop, a perfect sphere on his palm, rolls into the placid water. Veins of crystals spider off of it, creaking and crackling. The flame in the fireplace extinguishes and a trail of blue grey smoke streaks through the air and seeps out of the cracks in the wood siding, as if to curl about the house and stifle everything inside._

_Something shifts, the bath water is lower. To his waist. It’s empty and much, much colder. Frozen solid and sealed to his skin, blue veins snarling his limbs. He looks up. He’s alone._

 

Dean woke up with a shiver and groaned into his pillow, refusing to open his eyes. How can a dream be so awesome and so disastrous? He turned himself over onto his stomach and gasped when he felt his erection pressing into the mattress. Damn it all. He feined unconsciousness, staying in bed with his eyes squeezed shut, breathing deeply and thinking of anything but that stupid dream. He couldn’t handle getting up to see Castiel still in Sam’s bed, bundled up. Cas with disheveled clothes and his grumpy morning face. Worst of all, Cas stretching his limbs out, the ridge of muscle at his hip peeking out from beneath Dean’s cotton shirt.

It was only more frustrating when Dean thought back to the day before. It wasn’t that Cas wasn’t interested in him, it was that his interest seemed to be strictly clinical and analytical. It seemed to be for Sam as well, equally. He probably was just curiously fascinated with anyone who didn’t grow up in a hundred story steel structure.

What was it about him anyway? He was moody and stubborn and any decent human would have saved a life, right? But any decent Sentry would have taken him in. And whatever excuse Castiel had for the first time, surely it didn’t extend to the second as well. What other explanation could there have been?

So he was a man of average kindness, above average intelligence, who was bad at his job and didn’t know how to cook. And Dean had just dreamed about sharing a bath with someone who looked remarkably similar. As if that wasn’t the cheesiest thing that had ever happened in his life (he may or may not have picked flowers for a girl in his primary school class).

He drifted off to sleep for another few minutes and finally rose from his sheets when he was certain he wouldn’t have to have an awful conversation with Cas about the content of his dream while sporting a tent in his pajamas.

He stood and looked around. Cas wasn’t there. This time, Dean didn’t panic. He thought for a minute and then chuckled to himself. Cas must have gone out for food again.   
Dean really needed to get into the habit of eating three meals a day instead of just gorging whenever he had time. He was a hungry dude, typically. He could eat nearly anything nearly anytime but the lack of anything of trade value after the disaster at the fences tacked on top of the fact that said disaster was his fault…his appetite may have diminished a bit. It was technically a good thing. He couldn’t afford to buy sausage and bread, cheese and milk, without his generator. But he’d only eaten once since the incident. 

He decided to go track down Cas wherever he was in the labyrinth of tables and tents and kiosks at the Salvage. Maybe help him haggle for some grub or just stand off to the side and enjoy watching Castiel’s unwieldy communication skills. Cas needed to quit handing over copious amounts of silver for everything, he’d run out soon.

Dean weaved through the cohorts of grills and tables made of stacked wooden crates and thin linen curtains dividing the booths. He traded some scrap wire from his broken generator parts for a biscuit and gravy – he couldn’t help it and he figured Cas would appreciate him eating as he was prone to bite someone’s head off if he was too hungry.   
His eyes scanned the crowds of dirty, tired, hungry people. Cas didn’t stand out as much anymore with his scruffy face and soiled trench coat. His eyes kept finding dark messy hair or tan fabric but none were Cas. It was rather late; the last time Cas snuck out to the Salvage, it had been the butt crack of dawn. Maybe by this time, Castiel had eaten his breakfast. Maybe instead of returning to Dean, he took food to Sam at the clinic. Yeah, that had to be it. Dean shrugged to himself, sopping the rest of his gravy up with the last bite of biscuit and stuffing his mouth.

He sauntered off to the hospital, smug that Castiel finally felt comfortable enough to wander around the Dreck valley on his own.

When he arrived at the dusty flaps of tarp outside the crumbling building, it was quiet. He heard little sniffles and deep murmuring coming from behind one of the curtains. Dean recognized the low voice as Sam’s but it was a tone he hardly ever heard. He peeked in through the opening in the dingy fabric and saw Sam kneeling down in front of a young boy with a skinned knee and blood drying on his leg. Sam was holding up a piece of gauze to the boy and pointing to different tools on his tray, sharing his knowledge and showing him how everything worked. There were stitches in the boy’s knee already and Sam pressed the gauze to it and wrapped it once around the scrawny little leg. He stood and ruffled the boy’s hair and the boy returned a sheepish, snot-slick, red-eyed smile.

Sam helped him down from the table. “Careful not to tear the stitches, we don’t want to have to do that again. If you see moss on a rock, step around it next time. Oh, and tell your mother thank you for the muffins.”

The little boy nodded and looked up at Sam, who towered over him, with a look of pure adoration. 

Sam caught sight of Dean standing outside the curtain as the kid left.

“You’re the kid’s hero now, you know,” Dean said teasingly.

Sam just smiled crookedly and looked after the limping silhouette fondly. He glanced around the room a few times and then said, “Where’s Castiel? Had your first fight already?”  
His tone was joking but Dean didn’t have time to process why or what he meant because…Castiel wasn’t at the hospital with Sam.

“He’s not… I thought he’d be here.”

Sam frowned and got that deep upside down U between his brows. He shook his head.

Dean was sure he had checked every booth of the Salvage. He even checked around the tents where the rent-a-girls lurked although he was fairly certain Castiel hadn’t been remotely interested in them.

Where the hell else would Cas have any business going? He had a remarkable impressive memory if he remembered how to get back to the lake they’d visited the day before.  
Dean couldn’t even entertain the possibility that Castiel could have gone back to Aether. They thought he was dead and if he wasn’t, he was a failure. Cas had seemed to prefer being dead to his entire city than to arrest Dean and Sam. The only way he could go back, he had told them, was to drag them with him and, seeing as they both stood in a drab old building in the heart of the valley, that obviously wasn’t the case.

 

After Sam and Dean had scoured every place they knew of in the valley (Dean even snuck off to his hideaway just in case Cas had found his way back there), there were very limited options remaining. One was the Anarch. If Castiel had gotten down there, somehow, he could have gotten into serious trouble if Crowley somehow found out he was a Sentry. But Cas had seemed to uncomfortable making the descent yesterday that Dean doubted he would have gone back. The second option was the wasteland. Dean wasn’t sure which idea was worse. Dean swore he had made it clear as day to Castiel that he couldn’t go to the wasteland.

Realization stopped his feet in their tracks and he felt the breath rush from his body.

He met back up with Sam, feeling as if he had a lead weight lodged in his throat.

“This is bad, Sammy.”

“Dean, what?” There were beads of sweat on Sam’s forehead.

“I told him he couldn’t go to the wasteland… A few times, actually. And he had no reason to, but that was before we went to see Crowley.”

Sam’s jaw fell open and understanding made itself known on his face before anger did. “You took a _Sentry_ underground?! Are you insane?”

“No!” Dean retorted. “Maybe. But I trust him. Look, Crowley gave us some information… I think Cas might have headed east.”

Sam was looking out to the sands in the east and shaking his head in sympathy. “He’ll die out there,” he said, resolute.

“You think I don’t know that?”

Sam only gave him a look of concern and pity.

“We’ve gotta find him. He doesn’t know the land, so I can catch up to him before he gets too far.”

“Dean, I can’t just leave. I’ve got a job now…A purpose.”

That sentence almost hurt Dean enough to wipe his memory of the situation. What about Sam’s previous activities made him think he was purposeless? Dean and Sam did the same thing. He clenched his jaw. Sam had Jess now, and the hospital. That was what he defined as purpose. Well, if Dean was excluded from that definition, then the only purpose he had left was an idiot wandering around in a potentially radioactive, hostile terrain.

“Yeah, I get it. I’ll go alone. See ya, Sam. Stay outta trouble.”

He stacked off to his cabin to pack as much as he could carry, but there was too much already weighing on his shoulders. Sam’s accidental confession; the only thing in the world he had cared about in the past decade at least, the only purpose he had ever known, and he’d practically just admitted to Dean that his life had been meaningless. It was too heavy, but it wasn’t the heaviest. The heaviest thing for Dean to bear would be losing Cas, too. He could deal with neither of them wanting anything to do with him, as long as they were alive. It would be enough.

He packed a bladder bag of purified water, flint, a wool sleeping bag (really just a thick blanket sewn together), a pot and a bag of oats. Of course, all the guns and knives he had were strapped into his belt and across his chest, tucked in his boots and beneath his waistband.

During the packing, he also thought to inventory what Cas took with him for clues. He’d be able to tell how much or how little he had with him out there. The sealed wooden toothbrush he’d given Cas was missing from the sink, so he meant to be gone for an extended period of time. The clothes Castiel had slept in were folded on the corner of the bed. His suit and combat boots and weird gun thing were gone.

So Cas had an Aetherian weapon, which may or may not even work in the wasteland, and a toothbrush. Dumb ass.

His broken Audium was also gone. Dean thought of Bobby saying that it could be tracked and he assumed that Castiel had remembered that as well and burned it. Dean wished it was true that they could be tracked, and he wished that Cas hadn’t burned it, because maybe he could figure out how to track it himself. But he didn’t have time for that. He could track it to a sinkhole or an old land mine in the middle of nowhere and all he’d find, if he was lucky, would be a corpse.

Dean grabbed his own Audium anyways, in case, for whatever reason, he came near any other Sentries. He slung his small rucksack over his shoulder and took a deep breath. As he turned to leave, a glint of gold caught his eye.

The book about Prometheus was laying on Dean’s bed, on that side that stayed tucked in when he slept. He’d told Cas he would explain the myth but that was the last thing he could recall before he accidentally walked in on Cas undressing. Long planes of muscles, sharper and more honed than either his or Sam’s, but flatter. Deep dimples in the lower back, a slight forward hunch to the spine. Dean must have said something stupid and fallen asleep after that. No wonder he dreamed about that bathtub. He slid the gold-rimmed book into his sack.

The wind picked up a lot of dust and tossed it in the air. Dean’s whole body felt burdensome, leaden. If he couldn’t find Castiel, there would be no sign that said, ‘this is where you stop.’ Or even worse, if he did find Cas dead, what was he supposed to do? What would Cas have wanted? He didn’t allow himself to weight the options. That _wasn’t_ an option. It couldn’t be.

His eyes burned in the wind and thick gritty dirt devils that swirled around him. Just as he reached the outer edge of the Dreck, Dean saw khaki colored fabric flapping from a tree branch, tattered. He squinted through the muck as he approached it, his stomach in knots.

It was Castiel’s. He must have worn it out of the cabin and then decided to leave it behind. This confirmed his direction of travel, at least. Dean folded the coat up and stuffed it in his rucksack. He didn’t know why. Maybe the nights would get cold enough that another layer would come in handy.

“Dean! Wait up!” He heard from behind him, sharp consonants being whipped away by the wind.

Sam’s giant feet were clonking up behind him. When he reached Dean, out of breath, he said, “You didn’t really think I was gonna let you go out there alone, did you?”

Dean laughed without an ounce of humor. “Yeah. I did.”

“Jess and I kinda got into it. She wanted to come, too, and I insisted that someone had to man the hospital.”

“Probably would have been more useful than your sorry ass,” Dean teased, nudging Sam in the shoulder. They both knew it was a half-hearted and failed attempt at lightening the mood. Sam didn’t say anything about Castiel for a long time but, as is the way with Sam, once the questions started coming, they didn’t stop until the answers became nothing but disgruntled, “I don’t know”s from Dean.

“Are you sure Cas went east?”

“Yes,” Dean said, knowing he wouldn’t get away with such a short answer. “He’d been talked about it since he got here. I thought I had him convinced to stick around.”

“Where’s the last place you took him? Was he acting weird yesterday? Did you notice anything…” Sam trailed off, waving his hands suggestively.

“No! He went to the Anarch to see Crowley. He told us something about another group to the east of us in the wasteland. Cas went to find them, I know he did.”

“You took Cas underground.” Sam restated something he already knew. It meant he was about to have a strong opinion about the subject matter. He stopped walking and waited until Dean huffed and turned back to him.

Silence and dust and dread were all there was.

“What?” Dean finally ventured.

“Do you trust Cas? I mean really, how much _can_ you trust someone you just met, and you of all people.”

“What are you saying Sam?” Dean tried to keep his voice level but his patience was thin and his fuse was particularly short in stressful situations.

“I’m saying that maybe this was his whole mission. Infiltrating the valley. He wasn’t really going after us, he wasn’t supposed to. We’re just petty criminals. His decision not to turn us in could have been staged to gain our trust so he could get underground. The Anarch is the real target, right?”

Sam wasn’t making sense. Of course it didn’t make sense.

“Stop. That’s not Cas,” Dean said, as if that argument could stand against Sam’s logic.

Dean thought, if that had been Cas’ plan, he would have taken off after leaving the Anarch. He wouldn’t have gone to the forest. Or asked Dean to tell him stories. What good could any of that have been? But Sam was pacing and Dean could see the gears turning in his mind and he felt sick because _it did make sense._

Dean thought of the two times Cas had saved his life and he couldn’t figure out why. This explanation resolved that for the first time and it was terrifying. He’d thought he owed Cas his life, but maybe it was all predetermined. He felt like roaches were crawling beneath his skin.

Cas had kept Dean alive because he wanted to make sure he had a guide; someone who frequented the Anarch, someone who knew all the illegal activity that kept the Dreck from famine. Left Dean alive because they’d come back for him anyways. He couldn’t run from Aether.

He couldn’t let himself believe it unless he saw it for himself. If he gave up now, thinking he’d been betrayed, and Cas _was_ out in the wasteland, Dean would be the one abandoning Cas. He couldn’t risk it, even as dread surged through his body, choking every vein. He had to know for sure.

“It’s not Cas,” Dean said again, much less enthused this time.

Sam looked at him like he’d grown another head but Dean didn’t trust easily and he followed his gut and his years of refined skill in deception and survival. Sam knew that when Dean was adamant about something, he would not be questioned or convinced. So Sam followed him east.

“Okay, so if Cas did take off this way, why? What did he hear?” Sam asked.

“Crowley told us that they’d been picking up radio signals. It’s a female voice broadcasting classified information, claiming to be a former Sentry. She’s somehow projecting it from multiple alias locations to keep them from finding her, but Crowley thinks he’s pinpointed her likely location. She goes by Anna. Cas probably knew her.”

Sam made humming noises as he processed the information, let alone that there were any living people in what they’d always thought was uninhabitable land. “And you don’t think he’s tracker her to lead the other Sentries to her? Because she’s a traitor or a deserter?”

Dean scoffed and shook his head, knowing still that Sam’s arguments made perfect sense. The only way he could persuade Sam otherwise would be to divulge more information than he was willing to share with his little brother: about how Cas was different, how Cas wanted to know stories, how Cas’ eyes lit up when he read about angels, how Cas had treated his wounds, how he got flustered when Pam flirted with him. To share that information would be to open a window to Dean, not just to Cas. Because the window through which Dean saw Cas was a bit different than your average, boring window. He imagined his would be more like an old stained glass pane from a chapel, blue and grey and aimed to catch the sunrise and throw a spectrum of color to a dark room. Now Dean was afraid that it might be shattered and distorted or, worse, altogether missing. You couldn’t let someone change you like that, change your perception of an entire culture, and then just lose them. It left shards of glass in soles of your feet and in all the softest, most tender bits of skin. 

“Guess we’ll find out. But I’m not risking it.” Dean added, “I’m gonna find him and if he isn’t dead already, I might just kill him myself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hint: the next chapter includes an adorable anecdote about Dean's childhood and also explains what Aether's Deliverance Day is and why it's an "explosive evening."


	8. Arson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is shorter than usual, but I felt it was necessary. It's just one scene revolving entirely around dialogue between the two brothers. Very important information is revealed about the plot and there's lots of nice brotherly feels because Sam is so important. I just felt like this chapter needed to stand alone, so the rest will be coming out separately very soon.

The first night in the desert was cold. Maybe if he had been at home in his bed, he wouldn't have thought this temperature was even chilly. Maybe if it hadn't been Cas' coat draped over him, it would have even been comfortable. But he laid on two layers of wool fabric, on top of his sleeping bag instead of inside of it, and tucked the collar of the dirty trench coat under his chin. It didn't smell like Cas - not that Dean knew what Cas smelled like. It was smelled like dust and old fibers, a hint of the soap Dean kept in his bathroom, maybe sweat. Sam said nothing about Dean's choice of blanket but Dean knew how observant he was. Just this once, he didn't deny himself something he wanted to keep up his nonchalant indifference. He laid on the ground that was almost soft with fine sand but had the occasional sharp rock to stab a hip or shoulder blade at the most painful angle possible.

Sam sprawled out a fair distance away from Dean, probably because Sam slept like a rabid animal and sweated buckets in the process. He seemed to need very little as far as warmth or coverage but he did have the mind to bring a mosquito net to lay across his face. Not that there were any mosquitos in such an arid climate, but scorpions were always an option. Sam dug a shallow trench to cradle his body and then sad cross-legged on his canvas jacket in the center of it. 

He'd brought an old handheld, battery-powered radio that still worked but was only for emergencies because batteries were difficult to find and recharge. He turned it on and searched through all the stations it could reach. It was only static. No 'Anna'.

Sam looked up at him with his brow creased in concern and that same skepticism that always took excessive reassurances to wipe away.

"Dean... What if Anna doesn't exist? What if it _is_ a radioactive wasteland out here and we're on a suicide mission?"

Under the blanket of sky that was both the darkest - without Aether light pollution - and the brightest - with infinite visible stars - Dean had ever seen, he felt like he was an inch away from oblivion, from being singed by the impossible brilliance of the stars. Like he could lift his finger and point to one, and it was so close that it would evaporate him. It was something that shied away from sound and movement and light like a cockroach, but here, in seclusion and vast openness, it was exposed and invited. And it wanted to swallow him. He found it harder, impossible even, to brush off Sam's suspicions as he had earlier. He believed them and the fear of this wild place, unknown, ugly and gaping, and somehow still stunning, perpetuated his belief. He could imagine a reality far more grim when his ears rang with the vacuum of silence and his skin tingled with stillness.

"What if Castiel was told to lead us out here so we'd die?" Sam prompted again.

"What if Crowley gave us false information?" Dean supplied, entertaining the only option left that didn't crush him: Cas didn't know. "What if he somehow knew Cas was a Sentry, so he fabricated the whole story hoping Cas would fall for it and we would follow?"

Once he'd said it, he realized that was somehow worse. A Cas that betrayed him was still a Cas that lived.

"What if Cas and Crowley were somehow working together?" Sam said.

Dean was silent for a long time. His eye did that thing where it leaks tears when there's wind. Except there was no wind. Maybe sand, maybe fatigue.

"That's not Cas. Sam, you didn't see how scared he was about going underground."

"He's been trained all his life, maybe he was acting. I mean that can be just as useful of a military tactic for gaining intelligence as fighting. Even more so." Dean found it hard to get upset at Sam's suggestions because his voice was careful. Like he walked on eggshells, not insistent and loud like it usually got when he had a theory.

Dean knew Sam only said these things to help, but Dean's stomach was lurching and everything was closing in. He tried not to snap, again. They couldn't afford and argument in the middle of a potentially hazardous situation. He screwed his eyes shut and tried to imagine the lake, the fireplace, lightning, anything else. He pressed the heels of his hands to his eye sockets but he couldn't conjure up anything. Like his mind had turned into a vacuum as well. He only saw fireworks behind his eyelids as a result of the pressure, like an inverted image of the stars.

"Remember the first time I took you out to the clearing?" Dean said. His voice sounded small to his own ears and so quiet that he wasn't sure Sam would hear it, the void would eat it up before the sound could travel.

Sam didn't respond but laid down in his spot and shifted to his side to prop his cheek on his hand, a sign of listening intently. Sam was the best listener and Dean tended to skirt around problems, talking about nonsense when he was afraid. It was a habit he still had from the days when Sam had night terrors and Dean would tell him bedtime stories, or middle-of-the-night stories. He was starting to think it was more comforting to him than Sam. When Sam stopped needing Dean's voice at night, Dean still needed Sam's ears.

"I told you that I had figured out how to make a firework," Dean cleared his throat, trying to get his deeper voice to come back, "But I never told you how."

"Actually, you taught me exactly how to make any kind of firework about twenty times," Sam said, gently teasing.

"Hey. Jackass. You wanted to know! Besides that's not what I meant."

Sam chuckled a little and then made the sound that a question mark might make if it could talk.

"I meant _why_ I made it." Dean swatted some sand in Sam's direction but it only scattered like dry rain a few inches away.

"It wasn't because you were fascinated by the annual Deliverance Day firework show?" Sam said with comic wonder.

"Do you wanna hear the story or not?" Dean griped. He knew Sam didn't really care about the store but he cared about Dean so he would listen and they both knew it. This was how it had always been. Two boys who stood together while their life crumbled around them grew up to be two guys who learned to fend for themselves but made sure the other never had to.

"Okay, okay. Why'd you do it?" Sam said and, although it was dark, his smile was audible in the drawn out vowels of his speech.

"Third year of school, there was this girl named Cassie. Smokin' hot, according to my nine-year-old self. So being the proper gentleman I was, I wanted to pick her some flowers," Dean began, ignoring Sam's snorts. He'd seen his mom come home with a fistful of flowers on some days and she sang as she arranged them in an old medicine bottle. The school was just a group of kids sitting in a field with slates and chalk. Anybody who knew anything could teach a class. They had volunteers frequently because apparently starving to death required at least eight years of primary school. "It was right after I had learned to load dad's shotgun. Around the same time, I also learned how to make a circuit. So I started experimenting."

Sam groaned and Dean stopped to huff a laugh in reminiscence.

"I stole one of mom's bottles and went looking for flowers. That's how I originally found that clearing. Then I hid a self-made battery in the bottom of the bottle and snaked a fuse up through the stems, so when I handed it to her, I was going to pull a tab out of the battery through the bottom and -"

"Jesus Dean, did you kill this girl?" Sam asked, suddenly serious.

Dean's hearty laugh in response told Sam, no, of course not. They sounded a bit delirious, laying on their backs in the desert telling childhood anecdotes.

"I got nervous and pulled it too soon and my tiny firework crackled in my face and singed half of my eyelashes off and one of the flowers caught fire," Dean could hardly get his sentences out through his laughter.

"Is that why you got suspended for attempting arson?" Sam was laughing then, too. "And all this time I thought my big brother was a badass."

"Let's just say I never tried another romantic gesture again," Dean ended the sentence with a sort of dissipating chuckle and Sam fell silent. The atmosphere turned sober quickly and Dean wished he hadn't said that last bit. He took a deep breath and tried to make a joke. Nothing came to him so he just let the breath out in a whoosh and turned over, away from Sam.

He knew neither of them slept. There was silence, but it wasn't the kind that permitted sleep. 

After long minutes of restless quiet, Dean continued. "So I went back to the field and I redesigned the fireworks. Made 'em bigger and better. And I knew you'd like them but I didn't wanna get you in trouble with dad for celebrating Aether's Deliverance Day - "

"Doomsday, 'swhat he called it," Sam interjected, his speech slurring with exhaustion.

"Yeah. But the clearing was the perfect spot to see over the mountains, so I snuck out. And you followed me."

"You never did tell me why you liked to watch the fireworks," Sam said.

As many stories as Dean had told Sam, he rarely ever mentioned himself in them.

"I thought it would be a better place. I imagined that they would be watching my fireworks from the other side of the fence. I would picture another boy just like me who had the same life, only there would always be food on the table, and shoes on his feet." Dean and Sam had both been into Aether since then, and they both know how sickening that comparison really was, for a child to look at the city with hope and awe when it was the very thing that crushed him. "And later, all I imagined was that he'd still have a mom. That there would be enough water to put out a house fire if one ever started."

"Dean," Sam said, his voice barely a whisper.

"It seemed like there wasn't enough water in the whole world to put it out." Dean sounded like he was choking.

"It wasn't your fault," Sam's voice was gritty, a hint of anger.

"They were my fireworks! My projects! I shouldn't have had them in the house."

"You didn't light that match, Dean," Sam said with finality. It was that finality that always came up in this conversation that Dean hated, wished he'd never brought it up. It's memory so dear to him; setting off fireworks with his little brother and seeing his eyes light up like the sky. But it leaks over into his darkest and in the night and the solitude of this god-awful desert, they're indiscernible. And Sam still blames himself.

"You were only five. You were my responsibility!" Dean shouted. His ears rang, this time, from decibel of his words.

"No I wasn't. Before mom died, I wasn't your responsibility. And I shouldn't have been afterwards either."

"It was my job, Sam," Dean was shaking. His teeth chattered.

"No one should ever have to do what you did," Sam said, conclusively. The next time he spoke, his voice was much softer. "I can't remember what her voice sounds like. I try to hear it but it always sounds like Jess or Jo or Ellen."

Dean winced silently and was glad that Sam couldn't see. Sometimes he wished he remembered less of his mom. Sometimes her voice was so loud he had to belt out a song from an old record to drown it out. His eyes finally felt heavy enough to close, his body obviously weary while his mind still screamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT: The age of the brothers during an important event in their lives has been changed. It was mentioned in a previous chapter but I am going to go back and change that as well. It's very insignificant and doesn't affect the story in any way because it wasn't part of the plot until now. I tried to find a way around this continuity error, but I really needed it this way. (I used four as Dean's age when his mother died because that's canon, but I've made the executive decision to change it to nine for this story's sake. I hope that's not a total turn-off. I don't believe it lessens the potency of the event or the story).


	9. Temper and Nature

"In temper and in nature, will receive  
Familiar the fierce heat, and void of pain." - John Milton

On the third day, their mouths felt like cotton. Swallowing was difficult. Tongues stuck to teeth. They still had water left but, worse case scenario, there would be nothing to find and they would need to ration what was left for the trip back to the valley. They’d covered around fifteen miles each day, sluggish in the heat. At night, the sand cooled off rapidly without even the slightest cloud cover to hold in the warmth, no humidity to regulate the extremes. 

They staked out their sleeping spot and then each brother would walk a few miles either north or south, an attempt to cover as much area as possible in case Castiel had veered away from due east.

According to Sam’s calculations, they had made it to the fifty-mile point just before sundown on the fourth day. Dean knew that he wouldn’t have announced it if he wasn’t confident. He’d been using some method to measure and survey the land they’d covered at different points through the journey. Dean didn’t bother to ask what algorithm he used, he trusted Sam’s skills as well as his own. Fifty miles had taken them precisely to the center of a dried up creek bed. Dean frowned at the crunchy frog skins shriveled up in the dirt and kicked the toe of his boot into the dust.

They laid out their jackets, Sam dug his little trench, they said nothing. They’d made it. Fifty miles with not even the slightest sign of civilization, or of Cas. They hadn’t yet discussed if they would turn back, keep going, or camp out. But really, they couldn’t afford the last two options. Dean considered telling Sam that they should split up and take different routes back home to search more ground so that he could continue to look for Cas while keeping Sam out of it. But Sam was smarter than that and he was too exhausted to try to argue again.

Dean Winchester didn’t give up, but he also wasn’t a complete idiot. At some point, they had to surrender to the elements. 

Sam switched on the radio one last time and Dean tried to suppress the last thread of desperation that blazed inside of him. This was the last straw.

Scribbles of sound and static filled their ears and Dean let out a breath that hurt when he got to the bottom, his lungs decompressing around emptiness. And it hurt when he breathed back in. And he thought, with dread, that it might always hurt, every breath, for the rest of his life. Cas was gone, the desert sucked, his feet throbbed, and Cas was gone.

“Schh- precious Jim-schhh-y,” said a warped voice. Dean’s gaze snapped up to the small radio in Sam’s hands and he immediately lunged for it.

Sam was still trying to adjust the dial for a better signal while Dean continued his attempts to grab it, just to be closer to some strange and horrifying beacon of hope. The speaker said Castiel’s alias name. There was too much static and distortion to detect anything else, but he knew he heard that name. It must have been Anna.

“Hush!” Sam hissed and whipped his arms away from Dean, sticking his ear right up to the speaker.

The voice came clearer then and they both fell silent, their faces slack and ears turned. Sam looked at Dean and Dean looked at the box.

“If you’re hearing this, you’ve made it fifty miles east. As you’ll see, Anna is not to be found. I created a diversion because I didn’t trust that squinty fella you had with you,” the voice said.

Dean closed his eyes and somehow the hurt in his chest crystallized into something sharp and shattered. It took everything, _everything_ , not to double over and vomit all the water he’d consumed. The voice belonged to Crowley. Crowley led Castiel out here, into nothingness, to his death. He willed himself to keep listening, to not obliterate the stupid talking box with that stupid cocky voice.

“Son of a bitch,” he said under his breath, his voice cracking and shaking violently.

“But you boys, you’ve proven yourselves. So if Anna lets you live after you trespass on her land, I suppose you deserve to live. Sorry about your friend. Now listen closely. Walk three miles southeast of where you are, exactly. There will be a skull on the ground. Dig a hole two feet beneath it. You’ll find a metal box. Inside are the coordinates you need to get to.” Crowley’s voice became deeper, like a taunting growl, void of any sincerity when he said, “Good luck.”

The static came back and then the message looped again.

“Hello boys! So this means you _did_ go looking for your precious Jimmy. I thought so. If you’re hearing this…”

They listened to the message repeat about five times in stunned silence before Sam finally flipped it off again. The silence hurt just as much.

“Jimmy?” Sam said, looking at Dean like he already suspected the answer.

“Cas didn’t want Crowley to know his Sentry name,” Dean murmured.

Sam nodded slowly, pensive. Dean felt a cold shock run through his body, felt it in his hands like needles under his fingernails, around the back of his neck like a cold chain. The calm that settled around him wasn’t from a place of comfort. It was a thin, thin veil of composure and the fuse was lit. Within a few seconds, he went from silent disbelief to what he thought would be inconceivable rage.

It wasn’t.

It was a frantic, fluttering rage that left his hands too clammy and his knees too weak to be destructive. There was nothing out here to break, nothing to slam his fist against. It was a yawning landscape of smooth rolling sand and all Dean wanted was a sledge hammer and something valuable. Nothing meant anything out here. His anger didn’t mean anything.

He lifted his chin to the sky and screamed with his teeth clenched and his fingernails pressing deep purple crescents into his palm. He felt Sam run up beside him but he immediately starting swinging fists and the blurry air around him. He clipped Sam on the shoulder or waist, he couldn’t tell, but it wasn’t very hard. An iron grip encircled him and pinned his arms to his chest. He felt Sam’s shaggy hair dragging across the nape of his neck and he could just barely make out whispered assurances through his screaming.

“Dean, you’re losing it, Dean, you’ve gotta cool off, Dean, shhh, stop, please,” it kept on and on. Sam’s voice never stopped, like he knew that Dean would find one ounce of solace in a pointless string of words when everything else was unbearable.

 

Dean wasn’t sure how long it took for him to calm down but his cheeks were wet and gritty and his head throbbed. He didn’t have the breath left in him for one more shout. It was a great effort to swallow, he had to try twice before he could speak.

“Sorry, Sammy. It’s this heat,” he finally rasped out.

“I know,” Sammy said, loosening his grip around Dean. He slipped down to his knees and Sam sat down beside him.

“The dehydration,” Dean said. 

“Yeah,” Sam replied. They both knew that wasn’t it.

“So quiet out here,” Dean whispered. His lips were sticking together when he tried to speak and he could feel how chapped they were. He squinted at the last sliver of orange on the horizon and the crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes burned from sun exposure.

Sam only hummed in response.

“We gotta find him, Sam. He’s out here somewhere,” Dean looked up at Sam with blood vessels standing out bright red in his eyes, the veins in his neck turning purple. He started shuffling around the camp picking up his things and stuffing them hastily into his rucksack.

“Dean,” Sam said and Dean knew that tone too well. Sam would ask Dean to give up, and he couldn’t let him get it out. Because Dean couldn’t give up on Cas, but he also knew that Sam wouldn’t give up on him. Dean could only blame himself. He _wanted_ Sam to accompany him and now… He’d give anything to send Sam back so he could keep looking.

“I’m not giving up. He saved my life twice. I can’t…” Dean shook his head, stumbling over his words. Sam put his hand on Dean’s shoulder. “I can’t lose him, too.”

“If we stay out here looking, we’ll all three end up dead. Castiel is smart, Dean. Maybe he found whoever this Anna person is.”

“He didn’t have a radio. He’s smart, he’s not telepathic,” Dean retorted.

“It’s our best shot. I’m sorry but its true.”

 

Sam made very careful calculations of how far the box the needed to dig up would be but it still took them about an hour upon getting there to find the skull. It was sunk halfway into the sand and severely eroded. It wasn’t a human skull but some kind of large animal. _Hellhound,_ Dean thought. 

They dug with their hands until the tips of their fingers were tender and bruised. Eventually, they hit the rusty metal lid of a box. It was only about three cubic inches. Sam pulled out his map that had been entirely useless to them before and tried to find the coordinates specified on a tiny piece of paper. It was a fresh piece. It hadn’t been long since someone put it there.

 

Well after midnight, bone tired and delirious, they made it to an old barbed wire fence. They both tried to slip under it as soon as they came to it but they were shocked. Sam fell back on his ass and Dean snatched his arm back with a yelp. They both gave the fence an accusatory look.

Floodlights came from over a hill of sand where a very small structure could just be detected in the distance. It took whoever carried the lights about ten minutes to arrive.  
“Your names,” said a very assertive, feminine voice.

Dean and Sam looked at each other as if to confirm the other’s identity. “Winchester,” Dean said.

The silhouette of a petite woman stood between two taller figures carrying the floodlights. She pulled something out of her pocket and the brothers both reflexively ducked as if it were a gun. They heard the sound of electricity being cut, the absence of a buzzing you didn’t realize was there until it wasn’t anymore.

Then she stepped forward and lifted one of the barbed wires enough for them each to duck between it and the one beneath it. Her head eclipsed the lights causing a halo to glow around the brightest red hair Dean had ever seen.

“I was told you’d come,” she said as they dusted themselves off and stood awkwardly before her, as if to present themselves for approval.

Sam and Dean both spoke at the same time. Sam asked, “Are you Anna?” while Dean asked, “You have power?” She looked between them with a ghost of a smile, slightly entertained but humorless.

“Yes and yes.”

She turned and walked away, back towards the structure in the distance, leaving the two men holding floodlights and the two brothers staring blindly into them. They followed when they realized there would be no further introduction. For such a well protected place, Anna sure did seem slack on her personal security measures.

When they topped the hill, they saw that not only was the structure about ten times taller than they’d initially thought, there was also a sprawl of smaller buildings with the bright light of electricity shining through the windows of a few of them. There was an entire village here, much like Dreck. Small houses made of scrap materials, smoke billowing up from some of the rooftops, people gathered in cohorts with their arms full of children of belongings; every face stopped and watched the boys come over the hill and into their land. They followed Anna into the massive building at the center of it all. At a closer glance, Dean could see that it had very few windows and seemed exceptionally sturdy and inconspicuous. All he could think about was whether or not Cas would have been able to find this place and whether or not they would have allowed him in.

Anna halted and spun on her heel to turn back to them when she got to the threshold of the building. She pushed it open with one shoulder and swept her arm out in a gesture of presentation.

The light at first was blinding after having walked in the dark for many hours. It glowed blue like something that Dean would have only expected to see in Aether. When his eyes adjusted, Dean could see massive cylindrical shapes of metal and complex machinery attached to the sides. Everything was in motion, it was _loud_ , and it was somehow generating power, radiating heat. It was nothing quite as advanced as the grid system beneath the whole of Aether but it was far more than he would have thought possible for this barren, isolated place. He'd have plenty of questions for Anna about this later but his priority for the night was to find Castiel. If he hadn't made it to this place, he might have had only hours left before he lost consciousness.

Dean composed himself enough to reach behind Anna and pull the door shut again. It was far heavier than it looked and it closed with a booming, hollow sound. The motion wiped the proud smirk right off of Anna's face and the air between them fell still and quiet with tension.

"Nice toys but we didn't come out here for show and tell," Dean said, concealing his awe stubbornly.

Anna didn't budge, just searched Dean's face intently for deception or ill-intent. Whatever she found there, it wasn't enough to yield some kind of order to shoot him on the spot.

"Your friend Jimmy did not arrive," she said in a flat tone, not quiet sympathetic but not harsh either.

Crowley must have informed her that a strange, suspicious man named Jimmy was searching for her. Dean wondered how different her reaction would be if she knew that it was Castiel. He wondered if they had ever really known one another in the Garrison. 

Sam cleared his throat and stepped forward to join their face-off. "May we, uh, speak to you in private?" he asked in the most innocuous tone he could muster.

She pressed her thumb into some sort of padlock behind her and a metal grate rose from the ground on the other side of the concrete platform on which they stood. It closed them off from the city. She never broke eye contact with Dean as she said aloud, "ninth floor," and the cage began to move up the side of the building.

What was it with these Anarchists and their elevators? Dean fidgeted uncomfortably.

As they rose, it fell more silent. When they reached the ninth floor, the doors to the building slid open to a clean white room. Anna entered first. Dean and Sam followed but the two guards accompanying her stayed in the elevator when Anna gave them a nod. The doors slid shut again, eerily silent, and they were alone.

In the lighting of the white room, Dean could see Anna far more clearly. She was an attractive girl; deep brown eyes, pale skin, and abnormally red hair. He took what little knowledge he had of Sentry breeding and inferred that Castiel and Anna had come from entirely different specimens, as Cas had called them. They couldn't look more different.

"His name was Castiel," Dean said, suddenly. It was impulsive, maybe, to give away his identity, but Dean was desperate. If his last chance to find Cas was Anna, he had to take it.

Her eyes snapped up at the mention of the name and Dean looked over to Sam who wore an expression of surprise.

"Who was?"

"You knew him?" Dean pressed.

"How do you?" she responded quickly, seeming to panic.

Dean chose his words carefully. "Did me a favor once. Now he's out there somewhere because Crowley sent him to his death."

"Jimmy... is Castiel," she said again, as if the information was too difficult to process in her head. "What...Why?" she was murmuring more to herself than to Dean or Sam.

Sam, bless his soul, was already thinking of solutions while Dean tried not to break everything he could touch and Anna grappled with the confusion of why Castiel would have any business in a desert. He played the sympathy card, hoping - and judging by Anna's reaction to Castiel's name - that she knew him enough to care whether he lived or died.

"Anna," Sam said, stepping in front of her and carefully placing a hand on her shoulder. "He could still be alive. Do you have any way to find him? Vehicles? Sirens? Anything?"

She looked up at Sam with bewildered eyes but she seemed to find her composure when an idea struck her.

"The dryad. We have an old dryad."

She rushed back out of the room, apparently holding all of her questions and suspicions about this whole messed up situation for later. Castiel's name must have really struck a chord with her. Dean could only hope that it was because she wanted to save him and not because she held a grudge against Sentries and wanted to kill him herself.

They followed her out of the room and back to the ground level where she opened a huge tin door from the ground up. It slid on tracks and retracted into the ceiling. Inside was an old beat up dryad. Dean had never seen one up close, only glimpses of them flying overhead, but he could guess that this one wasn't in nearly as good a shape as the newer ones from Aether. His stomach rose to his throat. He'd never flown before but he already knew, going up in a dinky old machine was the last thing he wanted to do.

Actually, he amended, the last thing he wanted to do was to _not go._ To leave this search and rescue mission to complete strangers, strangers that wouldn't trust as far as he could throw. So he steeled himself and he stepped up on the ramp and into the cabin.

Anna buckled herself into the cockpit and one of her guards strapped in to the other seat. She handed Sam a pair of headphones and Dean a harness and rope.

Dean looked at it curiously, hardly able to form any coherent thoughts through his horror.

"This thing's not see-through," Anna yelled over the sound of the engine starting up. "Gonna have to look out the door to see the ground. We'll fly as low as we can get."

He swallowed around the huge lump in his throat but it wouldn't go away. He looked to Sam with pure terror. He saw pity and slight amusement on Sam's face as he held out his hand to trade places with Dean. That combination was enough for him to steel himself and slip the harness around his body. The propellers and wheels began to turn and within minutes, they were soaring. Dean's organs were flipping around like circus performers and he was glad that if he threw up, he could just aim for the giant opening in the back of the plane.

The rope was hooked securely around one of the seats inside the plane but Dean had to scoot further down the ramp to be able to see the ground at all.

"This counts as two, you bastard," Dean said to Cas, wherever he might have been, knowing that the high winds would carry away his voice. "Call it even."

He laid on his stomach, clawing his hands into the slippery metal of the floor, and leaned as far from the plane as the rope would allow. It was exhilarating and sickening, but he had to focus on the task: find Cas.

The wind stung his eyes, pulling out a few tears. It took half an hour for Dean to get used to the sensation of dangling out the back of an airplane and two hours before Sam tapped him on the shoulder with the toe of his shoe. He was tall enough to hang on to the rafters above the opening to the outside but he looked way too relaxed to be a few feet away from plunging to his death. Dean looked up at him and tried to read his lips as it was too loud and windy to make out any sounds.

"We're running out of fuel! We have to go back!" Sam bellowed.

Dean nodded up at him and turned to survey the sands again. He searched until the last possible moment, until they touched back down. No Cas. No sign of Cas. No fires burning or clothes strewn across the dirt. Dean wasn't sure if it would be worse to find a lifeless, decaying body or to never find anything at all but after such a long time, those were the only two options left unless, by some miracle of nature, there was water out there somewhere.

In his relief to be back on the ground, he thanked the gods. He prayed. He prayed to the stars and to the ancient Poseidon and to Allah and to every deity he could remember. He prayed to Castiel, the angel. He prayed for rain in the wastes.


	10. Running Closure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.”   
> ― Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife

Praying felt like begging and Dean hated begging. In any other situation, it felt helpless and pathetic but the situation in which he found himself was helpless and pathetic and so praying didn’t feel so bad. Still, he’d never admit to anyone that he said Castiel’s name that night just before he fell asleep; whispered it into the void that _just might_ have enough sentience to pass the message on. He decided then that it would have been better to find a body. He couldn’t stop thinking about tying twine around dried flowers, laying coins over his eyes, washing his bones and burying them at a crossroads. All the traditions of the old world. Because when you put someone in the ground, at least you know where they went. He would have preferred to know.

Anna had put Sam and Dean up in a few stiff, rickety bunks somewhere below the white room. Dean could feel the massive generators vibrating through the walls. Anna had seemed pretty torn up about Cas being dead, gone, whatever. She didn’t show it after they’d gotten out of the airplane and she didn’t ask questions either, like why Castiel was in the desert in the first place. She didn’t say much at all, in fact. Dean didn’t trust her one bit but still his immediate impression of her was that she was sweet and patient. He wasn’t sure how someone with her disposition ended up leading a huge resistance movement or how she ever got by as a Sentry.

 

The next morning, Dean got out of bed unable to remember if he slept at all or not. There were no windows in their room and he wasn’t sure what time it was but if had been long enough. When he stepped out into the elevator cage, the sky was the faint purple of pre-dawn. He scrubbed his hand over his eyes and his stomach growled. He figured the village must have something similar to the Salvage where he could bargain for food. He didn’t have much with him but he was willing to hand them the clothes off his back for a slice of toast, having eaten nothing but watery oats in the desert for days.

He stumbled around the village, so much like Dreck and yet somehow far more peaceful, until he smelled food and oils. There were a few wooden crates stacked up as tables with small lanterns sitting atop. The earliest risers were already setting up. He hoped he didn’t have to wait long before some food was ready. There was a hunched, frail-looking form covered in grey rags and fiddling with some strange looking contraption. It looked like an amalgam of modern technology and antiquity; wooden parts in some places and beautiful polished copper in others. It was sputtering some sort of black goo from beneath it and Dean could see a jam in the gears while the man in rags smacked it and muttered under his breath. Dean stepped forward and cleared his throat.

“Uh, um, I’m…Can I help you?” The man stood up and glanced at Dean for one second before glancing down at his hands like he didn’t know what to do with them.

“Actually, I think I can help you,” Dean said. He kept a straight face because he didn’t want the man to think he was mocking him, but he was thoroughly amused.

The man made eye contact with him then, with an expression that looked absolutely dumbfounded. Dean wasn’t sure if there were any coherent thoughts happening in his noggin and he smelled the telltale stench of stale whiskey practically radiating from what looked like a frayed old bathrobe.

He nodded towards the strange leaking machine and reached toward it. It took him about five minutes to inspect before he detected the problem, getting black stuff all over his hands.

“Think it’s fixed. What is this thing?” Dean said, standing straight again and holding his hands out awkwardly in search of somewhere to wipe them off.

The man just untied his robe and held out one side of it. Dean shrugged; it already looked like it was covered in this stuff anyway.

“A typewriter. I made it,” the man said proudly. Then, “thank you, um…”

"Dean."

“Chuck Shurley,” the man extended his hand hesitantly but Dean opted to pat his shoulder instead. He started to walk away with a tight smile.

“Hey Becky, give this man a double helping of whatever you got today, would you?” Chuck called over Dean’s shoulder.

A petite girl with wide eyes and an even wider smile shuffled up to him and handed him a giant platter of food on a thin metal tray and then skittered away again, giggling. It looked and smelled awful but beggars couldn’t be choosers and he was grateful he didn’t have to give up anything of value in exchange for the food.

Dean ate with his fingers from the platter as he continued walking between small houses and merchant tents. It looked a lot like biscuits and gravy but was probably not biscuits and gravy. He was too ravenous to care. Halfway through the giant pile of food, he had the mind to give the rest to Sam, so he started back towards the big building.

As the sky lightened and people started to emerge from their houses to start their day, Dean managed to circumnavigate the entire little community. On his return trip, he came across a nice substantial structure among the lesser works of architecture. It was large and clean and more permanent than an adobe hut. When he located one of its doors, there was a sign that read, “this entrance for minor emergencies.”

_A hospital_ , Dean thought.

 

When he made it back to his bunk, Sam was just waking. He left the food on a small dresser that looked like it might have previously been a toolbox and he left again; they said nothing to one another.

He found himself back at the hospital, pacing back and forth outside of it. He didn’t hear any ruckus inside. It must have been a slow morning for them, so he slipped inside.

It was far different from the clinic in the valley; there was a person specifically designated to sit at the front desk and receive patients. There were gurneys lining the wall on one side and waiting chairs on the other. It all smelled and looked very sanitary… And there were lights galore. The girl sitting at the front desk even had some sort of small computing system. It looked very primitive, but it was more than anyone in the valley had. Dean mused that the generator in the big building must power this place as well. 

“Are you ill, sir?” the girl asked in a chipper voice.

“Nah, I’m just… exploring,” Dean replied.

Her eyes narrowed and she crossed her arms over her chest in defense. “You’ve never been in the hospital before?” Her voice was much more reserved.

“Not this one. I’m just visiting from the valley.”

She stood abruptly and backed away from her desk.

“How did you get here? We don’t _have_ ‘visitors’ in the Free Territory.”

Dean tried to stay good-humored but her reaction was, frankly, rude. He made a face of mock-horror.

“So that’s what this place is called. I’m impressed. It sounds super free.”

She scowled at him and pulled a weapon from the drawer at her knees that looked very similar to the one Castiel kept tucked in his boot. Dean’s adrenaline immediately began to pump at the threat but he kept himself expertly composed.

“Look, sweetheart, I was directed here by Anna. Put your hostility away and I’ll get out of your hair,” he waved a dismissive hand at her and turned to leave.

“You’ve spoken to her? A-Anna?” the girl’s eyes must have grown twice their size.

“You haven’t?” Dean asked.

The girl looked bewildered, like she just found out a childhood fairytale was true.

“I doubted her existence. I thought she was just… a fable.”

“She kind of is,” Dean shrugged. “If she is who she says she is.”

Neither of them said anything for a few minutes and sometime in that span, the girl had lowered her gun all the way back to the desktop. Once that threat and the tension that came with it was gone, Dean put down his bag and shuffled through it for the reason he had come to the hospital in the first place.

“So I know you guys do a lot of …stitches and stuff,” he started. He pulled the mass of tattered beige material from his sack. “I was wondering if you could show me how to sew this up.” He ignored her raised eyebrow and knowing smile. She pulled out a simple sewing kit and tossed it at him.

"It has some diagrams on a slip of paper inside."

 

By the time he finished learning how to do some stitch called a ‘running closure’ and sealed up all of the frayed tears on Castiel’s coat, he had beads of blood drying on almost every finger and a crick in his neck from looking down. He hung the finished product on one of the rails of the bed where he sat until Sam returned from wherever he had gone while Dean was out.

Sam eventually sauntered into the room with dry clothes clinging to damp skin, rubbing a towel through his hair. “Communal showers down the hall. Hot running water. It’s awesome, you gotta try it,” he reported as he flopped down next to Dean.

Dean said nothing. He’d said nothing directly to Sam since they were in the dryad. Maybe Dean was avoiding the 'feelings' talk.

“Look, man, I’m sorry,” Sam said, eyeing the trench coat over Dean’s shoulder with worry. Dean knew that Sam liked Castiel but didn’t trust him. And that was good because it meant that Sam didn’t lose anyone he cared about. Dean would have liked to say the same thing. He knew there were supposed to be stages of grief or whatever, but this was different. He barely knew the guy. It had only been a few days. And before he had time to mourn the death of a stranger, he was given reason to believe that said stranger was a liar. These events didn’t permit grief, only a tangle of questions that wouldn’t make themselves coherent enough to be answered.

“It’s fine, Sam.” Dean used every ounce of effort in him to compose a pleasant face so he could actually look at Sam in the eye with some sincerity. “Really.”

There was a knock at the door to relieve Dean from a conversation he did not want to ever have.

“It’s Anna. We need to talk. Meet me in the white room. Five minutes.”

She never opened the door and they heard the sound of her footsteps on the metal grated floor fading out. Five minutes later, they were escorted – unnecessarily – to the white room where they stood before Anna again, her back to them.

Dean noticed, in the silence of anticipation, that this room must be used for confidential conversations. It had small windows in one section of the room but they seemed to be one-sided mirrors. It didn’t have any air vents or cameras and it was too close to the loud generators below for any conversations to be heard through the walls. All of this told Dean that whatever they were about to be told was something important.

“The reason we sent out that broadcast to the valley was because we hoped that Crowley would help us. He didn’t,” Anna began, “but he sent us you two.”

“Crowley never actually mentioned what was on that broadcast,” Dean said.

Sam, of course, was even further out of the loop than Dean was. Their mission into the desert was simply to find Castiel, as far as Sam was concerned, and it had suddenly turned into something much larger-scale.

“He didn’t trust you enough. He left that decision up to me. I've decided to take the risk,” she took a step toward Dean. If she had been about seven inches taller, they might have been sharing breath. As it was, she craned her neck to look up at him intensely. “We have something in the works, Dean, that we need you for.”

Dean took a step away from Anna and looked at Sam, skeptical.

“And what’s that?”

Anna smoothed her clothing and started to pace circles around the room as she lectured.

“We have been looking for a window of opportunity for a while now. The broadcast, in code, informed Crowley and the Anarch that we had immobile power. We wanted to plan a strike but didn’t have the means. So he sent back a broadcast. ‘ _Aether’s annual Deliverance Day is an explosive evening. Great time to make an impact on the community. Wait for the Winchesters_ ,’” she quoted.

Sam looked horror struck and Dean was just trying to process what he’d just heard.

“They want to blow up…what? Aether? All of it?” Sam said, incredulous.

“Some collateral damage may be necessary. We’d like to focus on the Garrison.” Anna’s face had become stone cold, wiped clean of its usual sweetness. “That’s why we need you two. Can you create a large-scale explosive within the given time frame that is transportable and discrete?”

“I can, but that doesn’t mean I will,” Dean said in clipped tone.

Anna whipped around towards them.

“I’m not going to kill a bunch of people over some stupid power struggle. I don’t care who they are. Not happening, princess,” he says with a stiff jaw. 

Of course this was too good to be true; a ‘Free Territory’ away from Aether’s pollution dump and the constant surveillance of Sentries.

As she untwisted a tangle of thin wires threaded through the cloth around her torso and draped over her shoulders, Anna turned her back to Sam and Dean. When she got the wire undone, she unwrapped her burlap shirt and let it fall to the floor. She stayed silent, rooted where she stood, as the brothers tried to absorb what they were seeing.

On the zenith of her shoulder blades were hideous scars and what looked like skin grafts made of some sort of metal. Her spine had small holes all along it with welts of skin puckered around them, electric plugs smelted onto each vertebra. It was gruesome and Dean couldn’t for the life of him look away. He heard Sam wince and knew that Sam was far more familiar with whatever bizarre procedure this had been. Sam probably knew immediately what pain level it caused and the damage that had been done to her body.

“Anna, what –“Sam started.

“I was considered defective when I showed signs of doubt and resistance. I was taken underground. I was disposable,” her voice wavered almost undetectably.

“This is what they do… Underground,” Dean’s voice was hollow.

“But you were a Sentry! You were one of them!” Sam said, trying to make sense of things the way he always did.

“A defective Sentry is not promoted to the title of citizen. They are demoted to ‘experiment’,” Anna explained. “They gave me wings. An attempt to harness the electricity in my body to power some sort of bionic flight mechanism. It was an unrefined procedure." There was acid in her voice.

Sam was still gawking, his natural curiosity and empathy warring on his face. “This… Jesus, this is what they’re doing to Jo?”

And that was it. That was the sickening, treacherous thing that was prodding at Dean’s insides that he was afraid to say aloud for fear it would come up in the form of vomit.

“They don’t kill prisoners. They experiment,” Dean choked out. “Cas…he – he told me Jo was dead. I would have – damn it, that they lethally inject… oh, God. Cas, you son of a bitch.” He felt like he was about to watch everything burn to the ground again, and this time he was stuck inside. There were too many discrepancies and they all pointed to Cas. Despite it all, the ache in his chest at the loss of him didn’t subside, it worsened. He wanted Cas here. To question, to punch, to hate. He couldn’t hate a dead guy.

Anna confirmed everything by not responding at all. She looked over he shoulder and caught Sam with his hand halfway lifted, looking like he hadn’t even realized he was reaching. She nodded at him in permission.

He touched the strange metal knobs and the beveled skin covering her back. When his hand lowered, she knelt down and shrugged her wrap back around her shoulders, securing the tiny wires back into place.

“There was some neurological damage. I was fortunate to have escaped. Many do not survive,” Anna added.

Dean’s jaw was clenched painfully tight. It was all too much. It felt like whiplash that never ended. The lies never stopped and they’d all come out of Castiel’s mouth. Why had Dean ever trusted him? In retrospect, it seemed ridiculous and he could see why Sam had given him so many questioning looks in the last few days.

“This is what I am trying to end, Dean. Will you help me or not?” She enunciated every syllable with a neutral tone but he could sense that she was wounded by her past, that it was taxing to expose those parts of her to someone else.

Dean looked at Sam who had wetness in the corners of his eyes. Sam nodded at him. They had fourteen days until Deliverance Day. It would take working nearly all hours of the day to make an explosive that large.

“We’re in.”

 

When he left the white room, he took a deep breath. And another. No matter how many times he inhaled the fresh air, how he willed himself to calm, he couldn’t fully reach the bottom of his lungs. He felt like he was suffocating even while gulping down air. Sam looked very solemn but, even more so, Dean knew that Sam kept one eye trained on him the entire elevator ride back down to make sure that Dean didn’t lose his cool entirely. Again.

He grabbed the coat from the metal bar where it hung as soon as he got back to the room. Once again, it was full of silence, impossibly compressed with too many things and too much emptiness. He was itching to leave again. He slipped the little book from his bag and stuffed it inside the lining of the coat, stomping out again. He heard Sam call his name as he left but he let the thick metal door slam around the sound.

Thankfully, Chuck was still seated at his little table where he had been that morning. He sat hunched over his peculiar little invention tapping out words on scraps of old, stained paper. There was a pile of crumpled up pieces at his feet. Nothing eventful happened today for Chuck. He sat, disgruntled with his writing, in his grey robe and filthy t-shirt, unaware that the world was burning.

Dean laid the trench coat across the table adjacent to Chuck’s chair and positioned the book on top of it. He started to walk away when Chuck did a double take and then practically squawked at the book.

“What is this?” he held it up.

“I’m gonna venture to guess you know what a book is,” Dean said, humorlessly.

“Are you _giving_ this to me?” Chuck’s jaw didn’t close on the last word, just gaped.

“Yeah. ‘Sall yours. What, you don’t have books around here?”

Chuck hacked out a note of laughter. “Most the people around here fled from wherever they came from. They tended to not choose books as emergency survival items. Myself, I was a writer. Not a very successful one, mind you, but I lost all of it.” He flipped the pages so that they blew wind across is face and then stuffed his nose in the crease and inhaled.

“Well, there’s the beginning of your new collection,” Dean tried to brush off all of this appreciation he was receiving. It was just a stupid book that he wanted nothing to do with.  
Before he left the guy to poring over his new reading material, Chuck asked his name, again. Drunkard. The book and the coat were poison. He was glad he could give them to someone who would appreciate them but who he didn't particularly like.

“Dean,” he replied.

“Dean. You know, you remind me so much of a character I once wrote with that name.”

His eyes glazed over then and Dean left him to it.


	11. Dark Thirty

It hadn’t been easy to convince the Sentries that the hound was docile; that it was only an abused animal and Castiel had taken it in for proper care. A few people in Aether had real pets, some had artificial pets, but no one in the Garrison ever had either. When Samandriel and Balthazar found Castiel on the outskirts of Aether, clutching his head in his hands, caked in dirt and grime, with this grotesquely abused creature chained to his wrist, they must have thought Castiel had crawled up from the grave. Eventually, though, he persuaded them, and through them all of the others, that he was sane and still worthy of his high position in Aetherian military. He spent a week back in his Garrison bedchambers with the hellhound locked in his shower at night, willing himself not to look out the windows at the valley. After that week had passed, he was confident that his rank was secure once again. He convinced his superiors that Sam and Dean Winchester had perished during his pursuit of them. The lie wouldn’t have been sustainable at any other time, but Castiel knew that it only had to last for fourteen days before it all blew up anyways.

As fearful as he was of sharing his quarters with the hound, he knew it would eventually be his only advantage. When Deliverance Day came and Aether went down in flame, Ignaparums and Audiums would no longer be functional. Seeing as most Sentries are pretty evenly matched in close-combat, the hellhound would be his distraction and his weapon. Every night, he went to bed thinking he should have asked for two. He went to bed praying that he could pull it off. He talked to the deities he’d learned about in the valley. He imagined them waking up from centuries of slumber, because finally someone called upon them. He prayed to the man from the story of the crucifixion for the forgiveness he knew he wouldn’t receive from Dean, but the man in his mind ended up being Dean anyways. He prayed to Prometheus to set fire to the world, and to the terrible angels to bring it all down, so he wouldn’t have to. But it was all in vain, he knew. It would be his wrath, his duty, not theirs, that would wreak havoc. He came to understand, in those final few weeks, that destruction was the only savior he could rightly serve.

Two days before Deliverance, he returned to Dreck on his own assignment. He reported to Raphael, one of the few people above him in rank, that he had intelligence on the Anarch and that he could detain the leader but only if he went alone. Anyone but him might prompt them to flee. He marched through the valley with his chin high and deliberately postured. He was no disguised this time. He came as a Sentry, armed and purposeful, and when he made it to the warehouse about the Anarch, he was flooded with relief that he hadn’t seen Dean. He hoped that it meant Dean and Sam had followed his false trail to the east, and he hoped even more so that it didn’t mean they’d died trying to do just that. Castiel could not permit himself to entertain thoughts of Dean and his brother; he didn’t have the willpower left in him to tear away again.

Castiel shuffled into the small moving closet and mimicked the motions and knocking patterns he’d observed in Dean to get underground. He couldn’t decide if he was relieved or frustrated that it was Meg who greeted him first and not Crowley.

“Clarence,” Meg said, “what a pleasant surprise.” He voice dripped with sarcasm that even Castiel could easily detect. He also knew that she would give anything to be relieved of his place underground and under the thumb of a man like Crowley.

“Please join me above,” Castiel said, stone faced.

She squinted at him skeptically and looked over her shoulder. The massive doors to the room where Crowley sat were sealed shut but Meg said nothing. Castiel inferred that she was being monitored. Her willingness to go with him made his deception far too easy. He couldn’t dwell on guilt. One guilty thought would pull all the rest with it and Castiel was well aware that there was a chasm within him that could and would consume him if he let it.

As soon as they were at ground level again, Castiel gripped Meg’s elbow forcibly enough that she would have no choice but to follow. She didn’t seem to be fighting back anyway, didn’t even make any sounds of protest.

He drug her like that all the way to the outside of the warehouse. When they stepped outside he said some arbitrary sentence about the weather while pantomiming the signs for “can Crowley hear us?” Meg was sharp, she caught on immediately.

She responded to Castiel’s question with an equally pointless sentence and walked further from the warehouse, beneath the shade of a tree. There, she spoke openly.

“He can’t hear us here but he’ll notice that I’m not within range in a few minutes. What is it?” Meg said, arms crossed and eyebrow cocked.

Castiel spun her around by her frail shoulders and released a restraint mechanism from his Ignaparum. It wound an impossibly strong, web-like material around her wrists. She grunted in confusion. He held the tip of his Ignaparum to her lower back just above where her wrists met and began to push her forward.

“Meg, please listen. There is not much time for me to explain. You are being detained and taken to Aether’s underground,” Castiel began but was interrupted by a gasp and violent thrashing. Meg was slight enough that Castiel didn’t have to struggle against her much.

“You sick bastard!” she spat.

“You must listen to me,” he ground the tip of his gun harder into her spine, insistently but not painfully. “When a Sentry detains a traitor, that person is under their jurisdiction. You must feign wounds and weakness and the effects of torture but I swear to you, I will not let anyone hurt you.”

“Why are you doing this?” Meg had calmed down considerably after hearing Castiel’s further explanation. Her eyes were sunken further down than the last time he saw her and one cheekbone was swollen. He knew that pretended to be tortured underground was a better alternative than whatever it was Crowley did to her. Castiel could sense by the way she squirmed to place herself beside him that she didn’t like being vulnerable and unable to see her threat but he had to keep up appearances as he marched through town with his prisoner.

“I need to get to Aether’s underground and I cannot do so without raising suspicion unless I have someone in my charge.”

“This is for your little boyfriend Dean, isn’t it, Clarence?” Meg asked, falsely amused.

“Dean has nothing to do with this,” Castiel ground out. “While in your cell, you will find an acquaintance of Dean’s who goes by the name of Jo. When you find her, you must relay a message to her.”

“Must I?” Meg said, as if she was in the position to deny him this. He knew that after Meg heard Jo’s message herself, she would understand.

“In two days’ time, the power will go out. The prison doors are heavily magnetized but they will open without the grid. You will only have a few minutes to get the upper hand before the power will come back on.” Castiel stood in front of Meg and ducked his head to look directly into her eyes as he said his message. She understood that it was for her as well. Terror and relief mingled in her features.

“You and your secret messages. I’ll have you know, your little hint about Deliverance Day found its way to dickhead down there. Good news is, your power’s gonna be off for a lot longer than you thought. Bad news is, it’s a bomb. A big one. And we might all get stuck under a collapsed building anyways.”

Castiel kept his features coolly composed for as long as he needed to process the information. He had hoped that his message about Deliverance Day would come to fruition but hearing that it actually did felt like lead weights in his stomach. The Garrison would fall and with it, Aether.

“As long as Crowley opens access to the Anarch through Aether’s underground, you should be able to get far enough from the falling rubble,” Castiel said, numbly.

“Want to know the other bad news?” Meg asked. She had that devious smile, always on her lips, but Castiel was quickly learning when it was a mask. This was one of those times. 

He waited for her to continue, as it was a rhetorical question. Of course he needed to be aware of all news.

“Dean’s the one Crowley recruited to build the thing.”

Castiel bundled his fists tightly in the fabric at Meg’s shoulders, not realizing how sharply his fingers dug in until he saw the contained grimace on her face. He tried to soften his hands but he felt frozen.

“Dean is here,” he stated.

“No. Dean is in the Free Territory.”

Castiel stared at her, nearly hostile with confusion and panic, until she explained more. She seemed reluctant to do so, and rightfully so, but Castiel was desperate and starved for any information about Dean. If she could just, just tell him, Dean is okay. He has to breathe and remind himself that she just did. If Dean is assembling an explosive, _the_ bomb, than he is alive, and he is okay… Except that he is building the bomb. Once again, every effort Cas could possibly have made to keep Dean far away from Aether when the sparks flew failed. It was as if Dean was an unstoppable force with an unexplainable gravitation towards danger.

“The Free Territory,” Castiel repeated, saying the words as if he’d never heard them before. He was sure he had, but he couldn’t remember where or what.

“That’s Anna’s place,” Meg said as if she was explaining simple math. “You know, the one who hung up her badge a few years back in exchange for a rebel flag?”

Everything clicked. It was underground in the Anarch that Castiel had heard Crowley mention Anna. He was too distracted by trying to jot down his message to Meg that he hadn’t caught all of the information. He hadn’t realized who Anna was then and now that he did, he nearly hurled. He gasped for air as if he could absorb understanding and comprehension through his lungs. Everything made sense and yet nothing could possibly ever make sense again. 

Anna in the wasteland was Anael, the lost Anael.

Meg’s features softened just slightly. She might have even laid a hand over his if hers hadn’t been bound behind her back.

Castiel owed her his composure. She’d given him her patience and cooperation, even if she didn’t have much of a choice. He couldn’t fall apart right here in the middle of the valley, in his Sentry uniform, with a prisoner.

“Dean is with Anael,” Castiel asked, although the inflection was more of an assertion.

“Jealous?” Meg teased.

Castiel moved to stand behind her again and march them both forward. He couldn’t process everything. It might take days, especially with the repression of any reaction. All he could think about on the walk back to the fences was his last memory of Anna. She insisted on being called Anna in private. Castiel knew it was dangerous; nicknames and sentiments and emotions, but they shared those things in secret. Before Anna disappeared, she became more unruly. She made outward displays of rebellion, she questioned authority, she mocked Castiel for being a good little soldier before he had even begun formal training. 

The others were told that Anna had been defective and was properly disposed of. Castiel always suspected that was not the truth. He remembered standing beneath the domed windows of the Garrison with Anna when they were only eighteen years old. She pointed to the east and claimed that out there, in the open, you could breathe. She ripped her Audium from her ear and stomped on it, impulsive and short-tempered.

Castiel shook his head slightly in his reverie. How strange it was that a mutual plot to destroy the Aetherian government and power grid would be the thing that reunited them.  
Just before they came to the outer reaches of the grid beneath their feet, Castiel reassured Meg once again that he would not let harm come to her. She rolled her eyes at him, but her expression was softer.

“I will see to it that you are not a casualty,” Castiel said.

“So there will be casualties, then?” Meg’s voice dropped low and velvety, like it pleased it.

In his most formal voice, he replied, “if necessary.”

 

X

 

In the two weeks it took to build a weapon of mass destruction, Dean took it upon himself to do anything in his power to avoid casualties. Sam was the only other person who knew his plan. He still didn’t trust Anna or her people and he certainly didn’t trust Crowley; if they found out that he’d tweaked to bomb specifically to _not detonate_ , he could get ganked or blackmailed or something equally inconvenient.

It took a lot of risky trial runs to get the design right but Dean had finally perfected the explosive. It only had two functions: detonate immediately upon trigger or don’t detonate at all. If someone wanted to blow up an entire city full of innocent people, they’d have to blow themselves up too. Dean thought the likelihood of anyone being self-sacrificing enough was low, but just in case, he also designed the bomb to look like it packed a much bigger punch than it actually did. Sure, the thing would blow the cap right off of the Garrison and do irreparable damage to the power grid, but it wouldn’t extend into the entire city. The fireworks are set off from the roof of the Garrison on Deliverance Day because it is the highest point in the city. Dean hoped this meant it was a safe bet that citizens would be a fair distance from the building itself in order to get a better view. 

Dean and Anna had come to terms: he designed the bomb, he got to be there when it was activated. They’d coordinated with Crowley to get through the underground tunnels into the Aether side. Crowley claimed that he had someone within Aether who would cut the power before the detonation so that its defenses would be down. 

What Dean and Sam hadn’t told anyone was that they planned to take that time to evacuate anything in proximity to the potential explosion. He’d assigned Sam to find Jo and run while he made sure the rest of the Garrison was clear of any life forms. It seemed impossible to do; he wasn’t sure how many floors the Garrison contained, but he knew it was visible over the mountains and it housed every influential person in the city. But he was Dean Winchester. It wasn’t impossible, it was just hard and he could work with hard.   
He remembered Bobby saying something about Audiums being able to receive signals outside of the grid. Dean had designed his own specifically to pick up on the presence of Sentries without the grid but that was only in very close proximity. He tweaked his Audium for a further range and had Sam walk to the opposite side of the Free Territory with his radio to see if it would pick up a broadcast Dean had configured his Audium to project. It reached the radio. 

Now Dean could only hope that Bobby was right and the Audiums in Aether would pick up a basic radio signal without the power. If he switched his on right at the moment the grid went down, every Sentry in the Garrison would hear a message to evacuate immediately and they’d have a chance of getting out alive.

Sam, even gentle Sam with his healing hands and his selfless heart, didn’t see why Dean was so intent to save the Sentries. He reminded Dean once about the horrifying, immoral things they did there. Dean from a month ago might have snapped at Sam but whatever that old Dean was had already snapped weeks ago and there was nothing of him left. He didn’t bother telling Sam that it was a Sentry who once told Dean that he deserved to be saved when he knew he didn’t, that he would be damned if he didn’t return the favor. He didn’t have it in him to admit that he was maybe sort of overcompensating for his failure to save Cas. 

Some how it didn’t matter to him if dead Cas was a bad person or not, only his perception of Cas when he was still alive held any real purchase on Dean’s memory of him.

 

The following day, they had to transport themselves and the explosives to the valley in the dryad. Dean would have given almost anything to not have to ride in that thing again, but they couldn’t carry the device through the desert and they didn’t have the time to make the trip on wheels. As nauseous as he felt when he even thought about flying through the air again, he was also longing to be close to the mountains, under the low grey clouds, tucked into the rolling green landscape and away from the blistering heat of the desert. This time, at least Dean didn’t have to dangle out the back of it. They kept the hatch closed and they flew as low as possible to avoid being spotted by Sentries. Sam chuckled every time he caught Dean holding onto his own knees with white knuckles when they hit turbulence or changed altitude. The landing was the worst. It may as well have been a nosedive because they had very limited landing space in the clearing right behind the old warehouse.

They sent two substantially sized things down the elevator at a time; Anna and one of her guards, Dean with his bomb, and Sam with another guard.

Dean gritted his teeth so hard it was audible when the doors slid open and Crowley’s smug little smile greeted him. He felt a growl rising in his throat but suppressed it when he saw the stern warning on Anna’s face. He couldn’t mess this up. Crowley was the way in. He might have been able to swallow his anger if Crowley hadn’t smeared Cas’ death in his face, quite deliberately.

“You don’t have your little man servant with you anymore,” he warbled.

Dean turned his fury back to Crowley fully. The doors opened for a third time and Sam stepped out just in time to catch the collar of Dean’s shirt. 

“That’s exactly what you wanted, huh?” Dean snarled. He was trembling with the _need_ to rip Crowley’s throat out.

“What, you think I wanted him to take my property, too?” Crowley asked, a theatrical look of incredulity on his face.

Confusion overpowered anger as Dean tried to understand Crowley’s meaning.

“Your property?” Dean’s voice was still acidic enough to burn a hole through his tiny little bag of skin. 

“Meg has gone missing and so has a hellhound. What’s Cas doing with that combination of things, you think?”

Dean couldn’t even formulate a response to such an absurd conclusion. Crowley was delusional. Clearly Meg took the hellhound and ran away from his clutches and he blamed Castiel. Clearly, Dean thought, surely, until he remembered that Cas wasn’t who Dean thought he was in the first place. He felt Sam’s giant hands clamping hard across the back of his neck and it was the only thing grounding him.

“Let’s just get this thing set up, alright? We’ve got a few hours until nightfall,” Sam said. Dean could hear the tension in Sam’s voice as well, but he doubted anyone else could detect it. 

Anna spent the remaining time debriefing Dean and Sam on the internal structure of the Garrison since she was the most familiar with it. She seemed almost tranquil, far more relaxed than anyone should be returning to the place they were ripped open and tortured. Dean’s stomach lurched imagining Jo less than a mile away from him screaming her throat raw in agony. But Anna instructed them on the best routes through the corridors as if it was her childhood home. Well, it kinda was her childhood home. But as Cas had said, they were created, not conceived. 

He watched Anna while she kept her eyes trained on the map in front of her, tracing lines with her fingers. He looked for any slip, any minute sign that she was in distress, and he found nothing. Dean thought he could understand why that might be; she’d spent her entire free life mulling over how to bring down Aether, and she felt a sense of peace knowing that it was finally coming to an end.

When he looked at Anna’s rigid features, he could see Cas from the first day they met; the hard-set jaw and the eyes that looked through rather than at. But Anna didn’t even have a whisper of the Cas that Dean had seen sleeping under Sam’s quilt, or the Cas that traced shapes in the stars, or the Cas whose eyes welled up when he heard about the angels. Part of him wanted to grab Anna’s face and beg her to tell him about the little boy with blue eyes before he became whatever he became. Anna had seemed to concerned about finding Cas on the first night, but hadn’t said a word about him since then. Dean wanted to pillage her mind for whatever it was she hid in there.

Beautiful, fiery Anna was a soldier once, too. She was a survivor and now a leader, which made her better at it than most. He didn’t have any faith left in him but he took a leap of _something_ and followed Anna’s orders, listened to her chart all of the floors of the Garrison and what took place on each one. Dean already knew what he would find on the top floor; the room with the domed windows, where Cas might have still been if he hadn't ever known Dean, where Cas might be sleeping or reading or whatever it is he did if he hadn't saved Dean from the blast of a transformer.

As night fell on the valley – they could only estimate the time of dark thirty from underground – Dean, Sam and Anna lined up at the blockade between the Anarch and Aether’s underground. After the thick metal walls opened, they would have to run through the tunnels quite a distance before reaching official Aether territory. 

Dean began to understand Anna’s untroubled demeanor as they waited, poised to run. He felt it, too; a point of no return, something soothing in the notion that he could die and it would all be over. Maybe he’d have all the answers to the muddy slough of questions that didn’t stop piling up… or maybe it would all go dark, and the answers wouldn’t matter anyway.

Dean gave Sam a meaningful look and let some tension fall from his shoulders knowing that Sam would have the fastest escape route. He put his hand into his pocket with the Audium, ready to switch it on.

The buzz of anticipation and the buzz of electricity felt like they were coiling tighter, tighter, a spring between the silhouettes of their three figures standing in the murky light of the underground.

And then the world went black.


	12. Deliverance Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I don't know how you house the sin  
> But you're free now  
> I was never sure how much of you I could let in  
> And I'm free now" - Bon Iver, _Heavenly Father_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are some things I should probably address before you read this. This chapter is very graphically violent and quite angsty. There are multiple minor character deaths. The violence depicted herein is nothing worse than the typical episode of Supernatural which is why I'm not archiving the warnings, but its definitely more violence than this fic has had thus far. I have already tagged this fic as a whole for "Aftermath of Torture", but this is the chapter where that becomes prevalent (although it is also for a minor character). Reminder that this fic as a whole will have a happy ending so stick with me!

Chapter Twelve

Dean flipped the switch on his Audium the second the watertight steel doors lifted from the ground. As soon as the opening was large enough for him to duck under, he was off, running through dark corridors with a clammy cold sweat on the surface of his skin.

The dense compact bomb tucked into a bag strapped to his back was heavy on his shoulders with everything it meant, everything it would do. But he kept running, hearing Sam’s footsteps clambering up behind him, trying to catch up. He remembered Anna’s instructions as her fingers grazed the map of the tunnels; take two rights, a left, one more right, and two more lefts. That was where Aether’s underground laboratory was. He knew it was Sam’s job to get to the labs and get Jo out as quickly as possible but when the door lifted, he couldn’t stop his legs from taking him there before hitting any other rooms in the Garrison. He had to see Jo. He was terrified of what he might see, that if Jo’s small, soft body looked anything like Anna’s had, he might lose his mind. Still, a primal protectiveness that was stronger than Dean’s rationale carried him straight to her. He’d learned, after finding himself in life or death situations multiple times, that it was best to surrender his thoughts and follow his instincts. They were remarkably sharp. When his gut told him to change a plan he’d formed in his mind beforehand, he did it. He didn’t have a choice. Dean’s actions were led by intrinsic feeling in high-pressure situations so with a highly explosive device strapped to his back, his strategy left him entirely.

When he made it to the right tunnel, he heard a loud commotion of human voices. It wasn’t something he associated with Aether. Nearly everything that spoke was a machine of artificial intelligence, and if the humans said anything, it was subdued and rehearsed. What he heard was shrieking.

Everything happened so quickly.

Sam caught up to him within seconds of turning the corner and stopping dead in his tracks. The hallway was dimly lit only by blue flickering generator powered emergency lights. It made the entire scene look surreal and animated, movements choppy, details hard to make out. The first thing Dean’s eyes found was Jo. She was crouched on the floor over a limp, lifeless form with a pool of blood seeping from beneath it. Dean could see the silhouette of another person approaching Jo from behind her and Dean immediately whipped his gun from his waistband and shouted at the figure to stop. When they looked up, he recognized the face, and it was a face that did not belong here even more than he didn’t:

“Meg?!” Sam’s voice came from behind him, panting.

“Hello, boys,” Meg said, still with her mischievous demeanor even with a gun aimed at her head. “Your friend Jo here is fine, just a little traumatized. I’d be happy to escort her out.” She lifted Jo to standing position by her elbows and started to walk her towards them, seeming eager to leave the room.

Sam seemed to be glued to his spot, his fists balled, unsure of how to respond. Dean shoved his gun back into his pants and rushed towards Jo, shoving Meg from her place with a harsh shoulder.

“Jo, hey, you with me?” Dean said, brushing her unwashed hair from where it stuck to her forehead with dried blood. “I’m so sorry, Jo, I’m so sorry, I thought you were gone, I would have come, I wanted to come, I should have come, I’m so sorry…” Dean just spilled, his voice pouring over Jo in a private comfort. The loss of Jo left a suture in him that he fought to hold together and it all busted open at the relief. Except that there wasn’t much relief: Jo was present, conscious, but unresponsive. Her eyes looked unfocused and she had deep purple bruises across her cheeks. Dean kept firm hands on her biceps and turned her to see her back. Her shirt was ripped nearly all the way open but there were no incisions in her skin, only bruises along her spine presumably from sleeping on the hard floor. She squirmed and flinched away from Dean's every touch and he hated it, he hated that they had made resilient, hard-headed Jo into this. 

He surveyed her body as much as he could in the low lighting to find the torture. Jo was catatonic. There had to be something wrong. He looked back at Sammy, his eyes pleading for help, but Sam was huddled over Meg, her mouth whispering in his ear. Dean opened his mouth to bark orders at Sam to come give his medical expertise but before he got anything out, Jo collapsed and started screaming again. It was blood-curdling, her knees going weak and her hands fisting into her hair, pulling out chunks.

“Dean, stop! Shut up! No, no, make it stop, please, Dean, please don’t!” Dean nearly vomited at the rasp in her voice, the pain. It was meant to be loud and insistent but she had been screaming so often that her voice sounded like razors dragging up her throat. She was saying his name, but he did nothing. Dean’s mouth hung open, stunned, as his hands fluttered, trying to alleviate something, finding nothing that could be causing this agony. Then, Jo tilted her face upwards, like she was begging something on the ceiling to make it stop, and Dean saw it. There were scars and bulges in the soft skin along her temples and beneath her eyes, and through it, a faint blue glow. She was clapping her hands over her ears, hitting and hitting like she wanted to go deaf. Thin lines of blood snaked down her neck from her ears. Tears were welling in Dean’s eyes just watching her, helpless, until she finally slumped against him a few minutes later, silent and gasping. Whatever troubled her must have ceased momentarily. As soon as the room was quiet again, Sam approached them.

“It’s an Audium, Dean. They implanted an Audium into her ear canal and cornea,” Sam said, apparently having been informed by Meg.

Dean realized then that if she had an Audium in her head, she was hearing Dean’s message about the bomb. That must be why she was begging Dean to stop. The moments of peace must have been the spaces of silence between the messages broadcasting straight into her eardrum. He quickly reached into his pocket and switched off his Audium.

“Get her out Sam, get her away from the grid,” Dean said with his teeth clenched, turning back to Jo and smoothing his hands down her back. "Get her to Jess." He meant for Sam to get himself to Jess, too, to safety. They understood.

There was a rumble coming from the other side of one of the thick concrete walls. Sharp, pained hollering was cut off quickly by a gurgling, ripping sound. Similar noises repeated, getting closer and closer. They couldn’t place the source of the noise but it didn’t sound like anything good. Each of them braced themselves with the defenses they had. Dean moved to stand in front of Sam and Jo, weapon in each hand.

The carnal noises stopped but there were footsteps clicking towards them still.

The red flashing emergency lights mounted on the ceiling mixed with the buzzing blue of the weak generator lights made an eerie combination. When the person – no, creature - rounded the corner, he saw the outlines of its emaciated body, the viscous liquid dripping from its jowls, and a thick chain wrapped around its neck.

Around the corner, there was a second figure, shrouded almost entirely in the black shadows. Dean could only see a silhouette of a fist curled around the other end of the hellhound’s chain.

Both stood entirely still. The hound didn’t advance on them, it just snarled, sending sprays of saliva and blood onto the floor beneath it. From what Dean knew of dogs, they could outrun humans and they loved a good chase. This thing’s legs were at least as tall as his own. He remembered Crowley mentioning that one of his hounds had gone missing along with Meg. But Meg stood behind him, so who held the chain? He stayed put, turned his head to the others while keeping his eyes trained on the hound, and said, “Run. Everyone. Now.”

He didn’t hear a single person leave after his orders. He wanted to swing around and demand that they leave, shove each of them from their apparent stupors, but he couldn’t make a move.

“Dean,” he felt a slight hand on his elbow. He covered the hand with his own and watched as Jo came to stand in front of him, her back to the hellhound. “Let me do it.”

She was trembling and it looked like an agonizing task for her just to keep her eyes open. Dean stared, unsure of what she meant, but as he waited he pivoted them around so that she wasn’t between him and the hellhound.

“I heard you… you were in my head. You have a bomb. I heard… Let me do it, I'm dead anyways,” Jo stuttered.

When the realization hit him, his voice came much louder than he meant. “No.”

“I can’t fight. I can’t walk. But I can do something, Dean.” Her expression was so calm. The same calm that Anna had, the one that terrified him to see on Jo’s young, broken face. She held a steady hand out to him as if he would just hand it all over and let her die.

“No! We came down here to get you out. You’re not gonna throw it all away, Jo, no.” He sounded exactly like his father, but his father wouldn’t have had tears in his eyes.

“What is she talking about, Dean?” Anna’s voice rang from behind him, like music in the hollow room.

He had to tell her eventually. What better time than the absolute worst time ever to drop a bomb. Literally.

“It’s manual detonation. Someone’s gotta press the button.” His voice was dead, his eyes didn’t leave Jo’s. There was absolutely no way in hell he was going to leave here without her.

Two things happened faster than any human could process.

First, the figure stepped from around the corner, out of the shadow where it had apparently been waiting and said, “I’ll do it.”

Dean’s breath caught in his throat. He knew that voice. That voice should not be here, should not ever have been here, what was that voice doing here?

Second, someone behind him gave a staccato bark and he heard a gasp from Sam. He pivoted around so quickly, despite never wanting to take his eyes off of the figure behind the hound.

Meg was slumped against Crowley, who had apparently snuck down the tunnel after them. He held her up with one arm tight around her chest and the other gripping a dagger that was plunged into her chest. Her eyes were wide and her mouth was open in a breathless shock. Crowley had a crooked smile on his face and with his lips pressed right to her ear, he hissed, “Whore.”

 

X

 

There are no good people, Castiel thought. Only good deeds. Good intentions. The hardest decisions to make were the ones that were grey. It benefited himself. It benefited Dean. Could he calculate the costs? Could he add up all the lives that would be taken? Would it be a negative number, compared to everything Dean’s life was worth? Compared to Sam’s or Jo’s or Meg’s? It couldn’t be. Dean alone was infinity.

These were the thoughts that he had been holding back with a dam in his mind made of willpower and light. He had explained everything he could to Meg once they made it to the underground laboratory and she called him a unicorn. She kissed the sharp angle of his cheekbone just before he left, “for good luck, not that a unicorn needs it,” and then screamed in his ear to keep up appearances. When he finally snuck his way to the Garrison basement, to the massive humming generators, when he finally pulled the lever and it all went dark, the dam crumbled. He considered staying there with the generators. He’d be closest to the impact. The first to die, him and this poor, unfortunate creature chained to his wrist. He wouldn’t have to hear the screams or see the steel beams buckle. That was before he heard Dean’s voice.

Castiel looked around the room frantically, angrily, before realizing it came from the Audium in his ear.

_Listen up, you bastards. You get one chance. I’ve got a bomb that packs a punch big enough to blow a hole through your little cat suits and every one of your damn prison cells. You’ve got five minutes to not die, starting now. Happy Deliverance Day, you sick fu –_

The message cut off.

He’d know that voice anywhere. He’d never heard it with so much hostility before, but it was still Dean’s and that was the worst thing of all. Dean building a bomb was one thing. Dean setting that bomb off was another. Castiel’s slight disappointment beneath all the fear was erased by the words in Dean's message. He understood, after hearing the message, that Dean had never intended to take any lives. Castiel did, and that guilt was enough for him to roll over and forfeit the whole thing. But he knew Dean was here somewhere, most likely within the impact range of that bomb, and Castiel couldn’t allow that. He couldn’t just die knowing that Dean probably would too.

He tugged the beast beside him along into the dark, back the way they came. At that point, there were Sentries in hysterics gathering things from the halls, gathering one another. It was so unlike them. How fragile their vessels of power were when the grid went down. How weak their vows. Castiel already knew these things about himself. Few of them stopped to notice Castiel with his creature and his determined gait. The ones who did were torn to shreds. He tried to feel remorse, watching the blood brim up over their teeth and spill onto their chins, but the act in itself was repentance. To let himself feel it, anything, would be to render himself incapable of finishing his task, and to let them die in vain.

He tried so hard not to count the bodies, not to look at their faces and recall their names. He did anyway. Balthazar was the last to fall at his hand. He hesitated and he shouldn’t have; it gave him time to utter a final word: “Cas,” before he allowed leeway on the hound’s chain and let it sink its canines into Balthazar’s gut. He could have taken one minute, just one, and explained everything to him, told him to run and that it would all be okay, that they would be free soon. One minute also could have cost them all their lives anyway. It was all going to fall, one way or another.

The red rotating emergency lights made the blood look black and everything else look like blood.

Castiel turned the final corner, deliberately hugging the shadow of the walls. When he laid eyes on Dean, it took everything not to run for him, or run from him. The conflict of aims kept him where he stood.

Dean had spotted him and he begged the shadows to grow darker, to swallow him whole.

“Run. Everyone. Now.” Dean commanded, his eyes trained on the hellhound. No one listened, but Castiel saw a figure coming up from the unlit hallways behind them. A few steps later, he recognized the man as Crowley. Crowley, who he despised, who he worked with the orchestrate everything, who gave him the lead to send Dean and Sam on a wild goose chase to safety, and who still, in the end, brought them back to the heart of the danger.

The next thing he saw was Jo approaching Dean, holding a frail, shaking hand out to him. She was muttering under her breath and Castiel couldn’t make out her words from the distance, but whatever they were, Dean was angered by them. It wasn’t until Anael advanced toward them that he understood what was being said. Anael, still as beautiful as ever, somehow looking simultaneously like the most broken and the most fearless person he’d ever seen. And he understood, with Dean’s voice and Anna’s expressions, that there was finally an answer. A reason that he’d forced his way into this room, a reason that he’d fought harder after the fight was won. After he brought the grid down, after he plotted total destruction, after the orders were carried out, he kept moving and this was why.

“I’ll do it,” Castiel spoke around a swallow halfway down his throat. It came out with immediacy, his stumble from the shadows urgent and uncalculated.

Dean swung around and locked eyes with Castiel for one second, shock registering on his face, before he turned back at a pained gasp behind him.

He saw the glimmer of a wet, shining blade tip as it slid from Meg’s chest. Castiel tried to shout, to run towards her, but it only sounded like, felt like, he’d been stabbed as well; a sob with no breath to give it volume, just open mouthed and horrified.

Castiel kept his eyes on Meg’s, unseeing but wide open, until she crumpled to the floor. He hadn’t even realized that Dean was surging into him until his back hit the cold tile wall behind him, hard. Castiel’s jaw was shaking and he tried to pull air back into his lungs but they were constricted around a sob that still wouldn’t manifest into sound. He couldn’t breathe and he was pressed between Dean’s body and the wall and he could. Not. Breathe.

He raised a trembling hand up to rest on the curve between Dean’s neck and collar. He just needed to check his pulse, just one more time. He needed to be sure Dean was alive, with moisture welling on the waterline of his eyes, and veins protruding from his temples. Before Castiel could count even one beat, Dean snapped his fingers around Castiel’s wrist and pinned it to the wall beside his body, so hard it might have been painful if he could have felt anything at all.

“You’re not…” Dean stuttered. “Son of a bitch.”

“Dean,” someone said. Castiel wanted to say it, but he didn’t think that was his voice. He didn’t know what was real anymore. Dean was real. Dean was there.

“You liar.” His mouth formed the words but the sound was just a faint hiss in the back of his throat.

“Dean,” the voice said again, more insistent.

“You were…” the puffs of hot, furious breath hitting the skin beneath Castiel's ear made him realize how utterly frozen he'd been before and he tensed every muscle he could control to keep from shivering. He was so close.

“Dean!” It was Anael. She stood behind Dean, trying to get his attention, but her eyes were on Castiel.

Dean’s face shifted into an unreadable mask before he turned to Anna.

“I understand,” Anna said, so softly, in her musical voice. "I understand why someone has to do it, and I need you to understand why it has to be me. It was my mission. It was my choice."

Castiel wasn’t sure if she was speaking to him or Dean as she looked between both of them.

“Take Jo and leave. Both of you. I will detonate.” Her face was expressionless save for a sternness that meant her orders were non-negotiable. But they couldn’t be.

“Anael,” Castiel finally spoke. “You did not escape this place only to come back and die here.”

Her brow softened and one corner of her mouth turned up almost undetectably.

“But I did. I escaped so that I could return and end this. There is nothing in the word I would rather do,” she replied.

Dean looked disgusted at Anna’s words but he made no protests, just held tightly to the bag with the device inside, unwavering. He shook his head in short, sharp movements.

Anael laid a hand over his forearm that crossed over the bag and her eyes were full of awe. “Dean Winchester,” her voice had lowered at least an octave and it was smooth like silk. Her presence was ethereal, as it always was. Anna had gained mythical status in the Garrison, and now she wanted to be a martyr. “How many people do you have to save?”

Dean’s chin quivered and he continued to shake his head, but his grip on the bag loosened as she tugged it from his grasp. “All of them,” he rasped.

When he said those words, his fingers clamped around Castiel’s wrist dug so tightly into the skin that it might have drawn blood. He didn’t appear to have any intention of letting go of Castiel.

Anna turned to Castiel and cupped his face with one hand, giving him the warmest, most sincere look he’d ever received. He basked in it. He let himself feel it, the way he did nothing else. He let it break his heart.

“I want you to leave. And I want you to live,” she said, sureness in her voice.

“Anna, please…” Castiel began before he heard Sam’s voice cut in.

“Listen to her, Cas. You stay and we stay with you.”

With tears in his eyes, Dean let the bag full of explosives slip from his arm. Sam put his life on the line as well, and that would have persuaded Dean of anything. Dean would survive this, he always knew. There was no other option, there was never another alternative. But Castiel had never imagined it would cost him someone he'd already lost once. He never thought he would have to hurt all over again. It was both a relief and nightmare, but he didn't make conditions with Dean's life. His only requirement was that Dean lived, and he would pay for that with everything he had and it would hurt in every nucleus of every cell. With the hand that wasn’t locked around Castiel’s wrist, Dean dug out a small black device from his pocket. Castiel recognized it as Dean’s Audium, but there was now a locking mechanism build onto it with a small button inside.

He pressed the device into Anael’s hand. He shook violently and the backs of his hands were beaded with sweat; her small, pale hands were steady, and so full of destruction and sacrifice and bravery. Castiel might have turned to dust seeing the exchange take place. A life he bargained for...of course Death would take something precious in return. 

And he let her break his heart, and he let Dean break his heart, and they did so devastatingly.

 

They didn’t feel the explosion until they were well on their way out of the underground. It felt like it shook the earth to its core, like it rattled the foundations of every structure in the universe. The musky walls of the tunnel trembled and sprinkled dirt and concrete dust on their heads and into their lashes. Castiel’s wrist had gone numb but he knew by the tug on his shoulder socket that Dean still pulled him along, Castiel a pliant weight behind him. His body was convulsing with sobs, his lungs heaving, but his cheeks were dry and he could hardly blink his eyelids. He could have sworn he ran from Aether screaming but there was only silence so profound that he heard the particles of dirt land on his sleeves.

Anna was alive all along. Anna was dead all along. Anna was never really alive, was she?

Jess was standing outside of the warehouse as soon as they went through the doors. She crushed Sam’s massive body into her arms, barely able to fit around him. He whispered muffled words into her hair and shoulder and Dean just kept pulling Castiel along, not once letting go of his wrist. Castiel yielded to the force as much as he could while still holding his body upright.

He woke up that morning believing he’d never see Dean again and now it was pitch black and there was smoke billowing up from the mountains to the west where Aether once stood and he wasn’t even sure where he was being taken but he wanted to get there. He felt Dean’s wrath radiating off of him and he wasn’t sure, in that moment, of his own name but he knew what Dean’s fingernails felt like nearly pulverizing his bones and pressing tiny crescents into his softest skin.

_Dean is alive. Dean is okay. Everyone else is gone, what have I done, what have I done. Dean is okay, Dean is okay (Sam is okay, Jo is okay). Anna is dead, (Meg is dead), no no no no no, Dean is okay, Dean is okay._

He muttered to himself like an incantation, waves and lulls of contrition and ecstasy.

I destroyed everything but Dean is okay. He might kill me now but he is okay. He’ll never forgive me but he is okay.

He wanted to feel Dean's vitals, just one last time, just to make sure it wasn't all a cruel trick. Instead, he only felt his own thumping pulse in his throbbing wrist, full of blood where Dean's skin held his and full of absence everywhere else.


	13. Funeral Pyre

Castiel was numb to the sharp splinters of wood digging into his shoulder blades. He was numb in his wrist where Dean's fingers were still tightly wrapped.

"We left them there, we just... we just left them there," Dean said into his ear, his body pressed against Castiel's. He was growling, livid, seething his hot breath into Castiel's ear. There was no kindness left for him. He shouldn't have the audacity to want any, he didn't deserve to be living, to be in Dean's presence, to be held against wood panels in a dark room, even if Dean's eyes were black with rage.

_They had a burial,_ Castiel wanted to say. _Deliverance Day was their wake. Meg, Anna, Balthazar; they're buried. They're buried._

Nothing came out. He thought his mouth was open, he thought he was shouting. The hand that hadn't been melded into Dean's starting groping at his shoulder, trying to explain by touch when his vocal chords failed him. Dean's other hand caught it sharply, however, and pinned it to the wall as well. He was immobilized and mute and he wanted to stay that way. He had nothing to say that might be beneficial. He just wanted to breathe in everything that was Dean, to absorb all of his frustration.

"How could you, Cas, how _dare_ you?"

Nothing. Nothing said, nothing done. He deserved it all, there was no excuse.

_I couldn't, but I did._

"What the hell were you thinking, huh?" Dean's mouth was so near that he felt the chapped skin brush his jaw. Castiel leaned his head back into the wall behind him, pushing his jaw forward. He felt Dean bite down on the hinge of bone just beneath his ear. It was savagery. He would have thought he deserved that too, but it wasn't painful. It was ecstasy.

_I was thinking of you, just you._

"You lied. You betrayed us, you son of a bitch, I should kill you."

_Yes. Yes, please._

Dean seemed to deflate when he said that, only a sliver of the rage he'd had before still simmering in him.

"You were dead, Cas. I thought... I," His pulled a hand down through Castiel's hair, combing gently one second and then gripping and clenching and pulling the next. Dean's every movement was indecisive; hate and relief seeming to grate against one another. 

Castiel could only shake his head, _I know, I should be, I'm sorry._

Eventually, the grip on his wrists slackened with exhaustion and he pulled his hands free slowly. Castiel reached out for Dean the way he would a timid animal with sharp teeth. Dean froze, for an instant like he'd allow it, but just as Castiel almost brought his hand to rest on Dean's temple, he seemed to slip through him like water, crumpling to the floor in one fluid drop.

On his knees in front of Cas, so incredibly close to him, Dean looked up and his eyes were bright again, like a child begging, and then full of despair, like a dying man in prayer. It scorched everything in Cas, it burned through the black sludge in him that he hated and needed so much. Castiel opened his mouth to speak, to finally say something, knowing nothing would suffice, but he was interrupted by an eruption of sound. The loudest voice in the world made resonant by every single ounce of hurt and betrayal.

And it was a whisper: "get out."

Castiel couldn't move. He wished that he could leave this room and return as someone else who could help and be everything he couldn't.

"Dean," he started. It was the only word he knew, the only language that meant anything.

"GET OUT!" Dean bellowed. The volume didn't startle Cas, but the immediacy did. And he had no defense. Dean had every right to cast him away. He couldn't expect his life to be spared, let alone to be allowed to explain himself. He couldn't have explained himself. It would have all been wrong. It would have been salt in the wounds. _I let them die so you wouldn't._ He knew Dean well enough to know the outcome of that would only be guilt and he would never ever let that be.

So he ran.

 

X

 

It took about an hour for Sam to finally show up to the cabin. Dean assumed he might have gone home with Jessica for some reunion, I-almost-died sex, or maybe took Jo to the clinic to patch her up. He would have preferred to be alone, anyway. He was beyond glad that Sam survived the night and that they had found Jo alive, but his brain was too scattered to communicate. There was nothing he could say to Jo. Sam could help her, all he could do was gawk. 

He poured himself a full glass of whiskey and left it untouched on the table. He couldn't think of why. It smelled too sharp tonight, something like that.

When Sam lumbered through the door, he let out a huff of breath like he was relieved to see Dean sitting on the sagging corner of his mattress with his head in his hands. Dean didn't look up.

"We found Castiel limping back towards the warehouse looking like his heart had just been gouged out," Sam said in a cautious voice. "Wanna tell me why?"

"You're not serious. Where's Jo?"

Sam took a while to speak and when he did, there was almost humor in his voice.  
"You haven't figured it out yet, have you?"

Dean looked up from his palms.

"Jess took care of Jo. She needs sleep, she's with Ellen. But Cas is coming back here and you're going to hear him out."

"Like hell. If he's not out of this valley by morning, I'll end him myself." There was so little sincerity in Dean's voice, it was pathetic, even he knew it.

"Jess?" Sam called over his shoulder.

Her curly blonde head peeked into the doorway and she smiled at Dean knowingly. He was infuriated with the two of them. How could they tolerate Cas? What could they possibly be trying to accomplish?

Jess turned and shoved Castiel through the doorway, patting him on the shoulder in solidarity when she stepped in behind him. Traitors, every one.

Dean stared at the cobwebs in the corner of the room. He hadn't dusted since his father disappeared. He should do that more often. He should patch up the splintered wood planks that let in a draft.

Sam walked to him with an apple, holding it out. When Dean didn't accept it, Sam turned his palm open and placed it there. He felt like a child and that wasn't at all how this was supposed to go. "Eat something, Dean."

"Alright well," Dean said, standing up and stretching his back, "I guess we're all fugitives now. We need to get out of here in the next few days or this place is gonna get torched with us inside." Somehow it ached more to think of the cabin being burned down than the fact that he would be in it. He deserved to die by fire. This house didn't. It still had scorch marks on some of the old floorboards from the first time.

"You're evading the issue, Dean," Jess said. Her voice was assertive and strong. He liked her for that, but not now.

"And what's that? I'm thinking about how we're gonna escape this once Aether gets back on its feet and comes looking for terrorists and I'm supposed to be playing ring around the rosie with the enemy?" He gestured towards Cas, still not looking at him.

"You just need to listen to him," she ignored his jabs expertly. "You need to hear his story. It's not what you think."

"I really can't imagine that he has anything to say to me. You know, Cas, you're a Sentry," he finally caved and glared straight at the man standing awkwardly in the middle of his kitchen with tears in his clothing, bloodied and stuck to his skin and his stupid, stupid combat boots. "You've always been a Sentry. I could have blamed myself for being foolish if you had just turned us in to Aether, but no. You worked with Crowley! You lied to me about Jo! You lead us into the desert to die! And you blew it all up in the end! What was the point of any of it?"

Castiel sucked in a breath like he'd just been slapped.

"What is it, Cas? You're just gonna stand here and I'm s'posed to just forget it? Kiss and make up? No big deal?"

He was suddenly much closer to Castiel than he meant to be. He didn't recall either of them moving at all. In his closeness, he could see the deep blue veins that stood out from the pale skin beneath Castiel's eyes. There was a green hue to his skin and his cheekbones were sharper than usual. Dean wanted to kill the thing that did this to him. He realized it might have been Castiel himself, and it was fitting. He wanted to kill him and save him and know him and never see him again.

"Say something!" Dean's voice cracked and quaked.

"I told many lies. I told them knowingly and intentionally, and I can't apologize for that."

Dean nodded his head, jaw clenched. "Then we're done here."

"Because if I hadn't lied, you would be dead or dying or worse," Castiel continued, steadily. "You would have gone to find Jo on your own if I hadn't misinformed you. You would have been tortured. I did everything I could to keep you away from Aether when that explosive was detonated, so I mislead you into the desert. To Anna. For refuge. I failed, as you know. I never meant for you to be there. I never meant to see you again." He sounded utterly defeated, which was exactly how Dean _felt_.

All night, the only thing that had kept Dean from falling apart was his anger, and it was suddenly stripped. He'd never had more reason to be angry. Castiel had put himself in danger time and time again for Dean and he could not forgive that, ever. But somehow his blood didn't boil the way it did when he fought. It still boiled, like magma roiling under something dark and stifling and dense like velvet. Everything burned and blurred and broke.

Sam knew. Sam could read Dean like no one else could. He cleared his throat and lead Jessica from the room.

"We're gonna go check on Jo," one of them said. Dean didn't know. Dean couldn't think.

Surely the walls would start to crumble any second. Surely someone would smell the smoke. Everything was burning down and no one could feel it.

Cas walked towards him with his hands held out and his palms turned upward, like an offering. A sacrifice.

Dean saw angry red crescent shaped indentions in the soft skin of Castiel's wrists and forearms. Those marks were his. He hurt Cas. Castiel wavered where he stood and when he looked like he might collapse, Dean felt a low rumble in his throat as he lunged forward. Cas breathed heat onto Dean's neck and his hands wandered around shoulders and arms for purchase, moving frantically like they wanted to hold more than they could fit.

Dean held Cas and he could feel their hearts hammering against one another.

"Son of a bitch," Dean growled. He felt Castiel's wet lips close around his Adam's apple, absorbing the vibration of the obscene sound he made.

"Don't ever... Don't you ever..." he choked.

"I know," Castiel whispered against the skin of his throat. He felt it more than he heard it, so quiet and reverent.

He would die in this cabin, after all, buried with Cas in a pile of wood like a funeral pyre.


	14. Moth and Flame

It took many long moments of thrumming silence between the two of them before Dean realized that the roaring around him was not fire, eating away at the groaning wood panels of the cabin. The burning waves washed along the curve of his neck many times before he realized that they weren't flames lapping away at his flesh, but Castiel's breath, slow and hitching.

A storm had moved in. For the first time, Dean didn't know what kind of clouds stirred above him, what kind of cell brewed in the sky. For the first time since he was nine years old, he was not at the fences, standing with his knobby knees and too-broad shoulders, watching the rain fall like silver thread and strike the soil like gunfire, leaving tiny craters around his feet. Watching his dad climb recklessly to the tops of the transformers. It was the only time he allowed himself to watch, in the pelting rain, because his father would never notice the hot tears brimming in his eyes. After a successful mission, he would ride home in the freight train, stiff in an effort not to shiver, and he would taste salt. And he would be ashamed, because his tears didn't taste clean like the rainwater, and because maybe a few had escaped and slipped down his cheeks to rest on the curve of his lip. His father wouldn't know this, but he always would.

There was nothing at the fences anymore. They were just ugly shards of metal puncturing the earth. He pictured them in his mind and they seemed pathetic now. Without electricity coursing through them, they were feeble -- blades with blunt edges, on display as a warning with no conviction.

He was certain that Aether would eventually regroup, with or without their power grid, and come for him. He hoped they thought he was dead, but he knew that they would not stop until they had his corpse in a box for proof. They would have to move, soon, but tonight, it rained. Hard. The water poured from the roof like a curtain and, in his mind, it was impenetrable and private. Everything in the cabin was sheltered. Everything would be okay for one fleeting night.

Castiel was still slumped in his arms. Dean couldn't be sure how much of his weight he was supporting, but it seemed like more than Cas would have willingly allowed. He shifted his face back to get a look at Castiel.

His eyes were shut tightly and his jaw was clenched, teeth just barely shown and chattering. His lips were moving minutely, as if he was murmuring a prayer to himself.

"Cas?" Dean said. It was more of a quiet grunt than any kind of articulation, but he didn't want to shatter the silent space that seemed to wrap about them despite the torrential tapping of water outside.

There was no response. It wasn't a real question. Cas didn't need to confirm that he was, in fact, Cas, and that he was, in fact, present. But Dean just needed to hear him, to see his eyes open and cognizant. He shook him lightly, keeping his embrace firm.

"Who was Prometheus?" Cas finally said. His words were muffled by spit and reluctant lips, holding fast to their contact with Dean's neck. He felt a warmth deep at the base of his spine.

"You can't just ask anyone who ancient mythical characters are. Just because we have access to these stories doesn't mean any of us know them by heart," Dean said lightly, his thumb rubbing absent circles between Castiel's shoulder blades. He could hear the smile in his own voice. Strange and sad and immensely relieved, tight lips that don't quite close around the vowels.

"But you do."

Cas' skin was waxy with a layer of cold perspiration. His trembling was so fine and frequent that it was hardly detectable. Dean hummed into his hair and took slow, suggestive steps -- Cas still pressed into him -- towards the bed. The one that sunk in on only one side. He laid Cas down in the dip of the bed and tucked all the quilts in the room around him. The thunder crashed, and Castiel's eyes went wide, as if it was the only thing in the world that could bring him back to concsiousness. That roar of a giant and merciless god.

Dean looked at Castiel with careful, scrutinizing eyes. Like the first night Cas had slept in the cabin, Dean couldn't reconcile his strength with the vulnerable, exposed human that curled himself around a quilt with a pout in his pale, chapped lips. He couldn't help but think that the thunderous god spilling his wrath onto the world outside couldn't possibly be the one whose hands sculpted the man sleeping restlessly in his bed. (And yet, when Castiel's eyes bore into him, when his hands tangled in Dean's shirt, and his voice rolled dangerously through his chest, how could it have been the work of any god but the most savage?)   
And the words of the myth of Prometheus suddenly became a truth, and not words that drifted in and out of Dean's memories of childhood, never attaching themselves to any particular moment. They became a truth evident only in this moment, sewn in like the threads of the quilts in Dean's own history, no longer mythical and magical and ridiculous. Hemmed in like Castiel tucked in to the quilt, no longer a collective tale passed on to strangers in a circle, but something personal and crucial to this one single moment.

He lit the fireplace, and smiled at the jumping embers -- still strange and sad -- and boiled a cauldron of water over their heat.  
When the water boiled, he poured it into the bathtub and ran and equal amount of cold, rusty well water to cool it off. Castiel had been shifting incessantly, so Dean knew he wasn't deeply asleep. He roused him with difficulty from beneath the quilts and coaxed him behind the partition to the bathroom. 

Castiel was comically exasperated at Dean, sighing dramatically and grumbling his protest at having to move.

"Your clothes are damp, still." He leaned limply in Dean's arms, more out of stubborn refusal than actual weakness.

"You need to warm up," Dean prompted. He was met with an absurdly endearing scowl.

"Fine. But when you get sick, I'm the one that gets to baby _you_."

That time, he got a real huff of resignation. Castiel stood up straight and shoved him playfully out of the room. Pleased with himself, Dean went back to the fire to warm his own hands and listen to the sloshing sounds of Castiel stepping in and settling. He busied himself with laying a change of his most comfortable clothes by the fire so they would hold the heat in when Cas put them on. He wasn't sure why he did these things. Castiel deserved to be wrapped in sharp shards of tin for what he had done. Just because he had saved Dean's life once again -- or tried to -- didn't excuse his other actions. Like lying.

He thought of the dead, taking an inventory of faults. What was his own guilt, and what was Castiel's. He came to find they were the same. Castiel had been behind the plan to blow Aether to smithereens. It couldn't have been carried out without an inside man. But it also couldn't have been done without Dean...arguably the only person who could have built it. Anna's death was Dean's. He had made the stupid decision to bring Castiel into the Anarch, even pointing out the eerie presence of the hellhounds. Meg's death, too, was on him. The calamity that happened before the explosion was due to his announcement over Sentry-radio-whatever. If he hadn't made the announcement, they all might have died in the Garrison anyway. If not, maybe he could have negotiated discretely and effectively without all the panic. Maybe the bomb would have never gone off.

Jo was alive. She had always been alive. Strange and sad and immensely relieved. She would need recovery time. Sam and Jess weren't sure how extensive her injuries were, physical or otherwise, but she was unresponsive for the time being. Dean thought that being near her might be traumatizing for her; he remembered her frantic begging for him to stop as soon as she heard his broadcast voice. He decided not to use his voice around her until she was well. Maybe it wasn't even a good idea to be in her presence. Dean had been the one to tell Ellen that Jo was taken. He couldn't imagine how angry at him she'd be now. Or at Castiel for that matter.

So that was it. There would be an excommunication of both of them from all corners of life; the things they had destroyed and the things they had spared. And the things they had destroyed in order to spare, like Castiel's siblings. And the things that had spared in order to destroy, like Crowley. Like vengeful, opposing, merciless gods. With no altars. With no temples or sanctuaries. With no stories in the mouths of the people.

And there would be -- now, as always -- an impossibly high fence between themselves, Dean and Castiel, charged with the power of lies and deceit and something else. Something else whose presence crackled beneath their feet and brewed in the skies above them, and it couldn't be named. It was the stuff that gods and devils were made of, the stuff that elevated a mere name to a promise that people made on their knees. It would divide them, the two small, powerless, empty gods of war (one short-lived, unfair war) fought on a purple-grey night in a corridor underneath the earth. The two insignificant, terrible gods of damp ash and a dark, powerless city swimming in chaos, crashing into the sea. They were nameless and purposeless, and they brought the world down on their own heads. It sounded like many myths Dean had heard before.

X

The water was unpleasantly warm, prickling Castiel's skin as he stepped in. He braced himself on the sides of the porcelain tub, shaking freely now that Dean was on the other side of the divider. He felt like the little helpless needles on the pines that shivered in the wind and nodded under the weight of raindrops. The tub filled with his volume and he lifted his hands into the bitter air, letting it bite his skin blue, and then lowered them back into the water, watching the line rise up and threaten to spill. The water at his feet was cooler than that at his chest, and he tucked his knees against himself to hoard the higher temperatures. An old tin can with a layer of rust sat at the corner of the tub. He turned it about in his hands until he inferred that it was meant for rinsing his hair. He dreaded the cold, but he knew he was covered in a layer of ash and dirt, like he'd just crawled from an Old World grave. 

_I was buried alive,_ he thought. _We all were._

The dogs in the Anarch, Meg beneath the Garrison, Balthazar one layer up from that, beneath beams of steel and piles of concrete. They were buried dead. The rest crawled up from the underworld, choking on the dust of the dead and the dying, guilt eating at their organs like maggots. Slipping through the only threshold that stood; the moving closet beneath the warehouse.

He shook violently and sunk beneath the water, disregarding the rusty can, spilling just a bit on the cracked, warped flooring.

He stayed under until his lungs hurt. When he resurfaced, Dean was midsentence.

"...brought fire to the world of humans."

Castiel scrubbed his skin raw, letting the water cool around him, reaching equilibrium with the air. He listened to Dean's story, imagining Dean's body, stretched across Sam's bed (as it was closer to the fire) with his arms above his head, eyes closed. He told it beautifully, but Castiel knew he didn't read the words from a book. There was no rustling of pages or pauses or stuttering pronunciation.

"So Zeus, he was the big man upstairs. The god of thunder. The northern isles called him Thor. He lived up on Olympus, the mountain that stood above Athens. Athens was a great city of the European isles before they sank. Some believe they never existed, but they did. I know because I've seen islands sink before, just off the coast of this land. They look like jagged teeth and the sea closes its massive yawning mouth around them when the tide comes in. Zeus lived in a place like that, only bigger. He was a dick and he had a big family of other equally dick-y dicks."

No book could ever possibly be as entertaining as Dean, Cas decided.

A bodiless arm reached around the partition with a folded stack of clothes. Castiel stood and reached for them, and they were warm. His muttered "thank you, Dean," was equally warm. He'd lost count of how many times he'd borrowed clothes from the brothers. He wished he'd been able to give them more in return. Now, everything he owned was somewhere near the top of a pile of charred ruin.

Castiel stepped into the main room and immediately towards the fire as he pulled the loose cotton shirt down around his torso. Dean watched him with predatory eyes -- careful and mistrusting -- that raked down his body. Castiel knew Dean's continued hospitality was only temporary. No person could tolerate all that he'd done. He waited for the moment that Dean would find his convictions and banish Castiel from his life forever. He only prayed that it wouldn't be right then, any other time would do, any other time would be tolerable, but if Dean's searching eyes broke from his body in this moment and never came back, he wouldn't survive it.

He sat as close to Dean and the fire as he dared, but it wasn't close enough. He ached for warmth from both.

Much to Castiel's surprise, Dean hooked a (careful and mistrusting) hand around Castiel's shoulder and directed him closer. He pulled a torn piece of fabric from a bedside table and laid it over Castiel's head. He wasn't sure what it was, but Dean massaged it through his hair and into his scalp, and it was divine hell.

"Gotta dry your hair, you'll warm up way faster," Dean mumbled in explanation, apparently noting that Castiel was confused by his actions. Castiel hoped his hair would never dry. He hoped that this rag was far less efficient than the air dryers they had in the Garrison. He hoped Dean's hands never left him.

"They say we were made of clay," Dean continued. 

Castiel stifled a laugh that threatened his lips: he could imagine himself as something pliable and filthy, being sculpted by Dean's hands, giving in to his every touch. He could imagine Dean digging up a clump from the earth and giving it a gun and a stern face and then making it go limp with rapture under his fingers.

"They say we were golden first. Then silver, then bronze. And finally, clay."

Castiel watched a white moth fly into the fire, so desperate for light and heat that it singed its wings and fell.

"Maybe next is ash. Maybe that's why we can't seem to stop tearing everything apart," Castiel contributed. It was the first he'd spoken in hours and his voice came out like a rusty shard of a tin can.

He looked at Dean, directly, coherently. To the left eye then the right, and back again. Dean seemed to survey him just the same, careful and mistrusting still. And he had a silly, naive thought. That maybe all of the guilt wasn't theirs alone. That all of the blame wasn't something they'd reaped for themselves and now sat around a fire with chunks of it scattered across the room like gravediggers tracking in mud from their spoils. That maybe they were a product of their time in history. That maybe they would go down not as the people made of clay or those made of ash, but as the people in between who were caught in the slippery descent from one to the next. The innocents that fell from grace. Like the white moth, burning in desperation for light.


	15. Silhouettes

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;” -W. B. Yeats

The next morning, Dean stood in his simple, humble house, in the stagnant, chilly air sliced through with thin blades of light. Disturbed particles of dust scurried around and glinted in the sparse sun. He turned in a full circle once, slowly, to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything crucial. He touched his fingertips to the cracked porcelain lip of the bathtub, (as if it were the wooden edge of a coffin at an open viewing) lingered for one full second, and walked out.

He couldn’t allow himself to say goodbye to a place. He had said goodbye to enough people tied to that place. It was time. The old, shitty house didn’t deserve a goodbye. It was just a pile of wood. An arbitrary place his parents had landed when they came to the valley all those years ago. That was all.

And Dean couldn’t afford to actually believe he could have a home. A place he could stay, safely, indefinitely. That wasn’t for him. And it wasn’t for Sam either, because of Dean’s choices. And their father’s choices. And the choices of some other father’s father who held his finger over a button and, one day, decided to push it, and scatter the world and all it's people into the wind like disturbed dust.

“Get a move on, Sam,” Dean said roughly.

He’d said those words before, mimicking his father. After big cons, sometimes they had to relocate. His dad would dump the brothers at Ellen’s or Bobby’s or with another family friend. They would rotate so there wouldn’t be a noticeable pattern. They’d had to vacate the little cabin for weeks or months at a time, but they’d always gone back. Since Dean’s father disappeared, he’d always stayed there. He kept the missions small, discrete, and didn’t make mistakes. Until now – when he became the man with his finger lingering on a button.

“Dean, don’t you want to take anything else?” Sam asked. When Dean peered back through the doorway, squinting into the dark room, he saw that Sam was holding a messy portrait Dean had made of their mother when he was a child.

“No room,” Dean said. “Hurry up.”

He scanned the sky for dryads, although there wouldn’t be any. They would know when Aether got it’s lights back on. Anyone within range of the city would be made aware. Before then, the dryads wouldn’t fly. The only one they knew of that was functional was the old one from the Free Territory, and that was parked under a tree in the valley, waiting to take them back.

Sam looked at him with an unreadable expression, his brows knitted together. Dean hated being on the receiving end of that look. He leaned against the wood panels while Sam packed himself.

Cas had been sent to Bobby’s house before dawn, to ensure that no citizens of Dreck saw him. He and Dean had decided the night before, around the fireplace, that that would be best, seeing as how Castiel blew his cover when he marched Meg through the center of town in restraints.

That was a first for the valley: actually seeing a Sentry take someone into custody rather than just abducting them in secrecy. It would surely be talked about, not to mention the fact that Castiel was the last Sentry to be seen in the valley before the explosion.

Dean felt a pang of sympathy for Cas, who was probably being grilled by Bobby this very moment. He already didn’t take to Cas’ presence too well. Dean couldn’t imagine what kind of resentment Bobby would have for Cas now. And Ellen. Dean could only hope he got to Bobby’s before she did, or he’d show up to find Cas beaten to a pulp. Dean knew he had enough authority that if he said Cas got a place to stay, he got a place to stay, but that was as far as it extended. It would probably be on the most uncomfortable couch, next to the window with the worst draft, and under the constant surveillance of a sawed-off shotgun.

That was probably how Cas needed to be dealt with anyway, but it made Dean uncomfortable to think of Cas under that kind of scrutiny without him there.

“Sam!” Dean barked.

 

Alright, Dean was beyond confused.

When he showed up to Bobby’s lugging a trunk full of necessities, Sam in tow, Ellen came barreling out of the house. The woman was always stern, but over the years, Dean had learned to read when she was bad-stern and when she was affectionate-stern. This was sickly-sweet-affectionate-stern.

“Come here, boys.”

She almost always stood on the porch with her hands on her hips, giving them a kindly disapproving look. This time, though, her eyes were watery and her voice wavered as she took both of them in her arms. Rib-breaking tight.

What was happening? Was she off her rocker?

Dean and Sam greeted her back but looked to each other with concern.

She held Dean’s face in her hands, squeezing his cheeks together. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cas, standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, looking more casual than he had ever seen him. Dean shot Cas a bewildered look, and he only stared back with just the ghost of a smile.

“Dean Winchester. You are a stupid, stupid boy. But you’re a brave, stupid boy. Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again, understand?” Ellen nearly choked out.

“Yish ma’am” he replied through squished lips.

“And your soldier over there,” she said in a lower, secretive voice, “you keep him around. You hear?”

“Mmmmph,” Dean managed, squinting back at Castiel suspiciously. Something very strange was happening. Hell was freezing over.

He looked to Sam, desperate for some kind of inference he wasn’t picking up, but Sam just laughed and looked at Dean like he was hopelessly ignorant.

He felt hopelessly ignorant.

“Is Jo alright?” he breached, assuming she had to be making progress if Ellen was so cheerful.

Ellen just put her hand around the brothers’ shoulders and coaxed them inside Bobby’s house in a silent promise to explain later.

So it wasn’t a simple yes or no answer, then.

Dean began to worry, severely. This woman he'd always known to be a harsh, war-torn survivor was suddenly acting like some cheerful auntie on Christmas Day.

Cas had relocated to the couch. The biggest, coziest one in the sitting room, looking as at-home as one can look with perfect Sentry-stiff posture.

“Boys, we’ve got good news and bad news.” Bobby came wheeling in, ready for business as always. It was a relief to see that Bobby hadn't turned into a jolly old elf, but even he had a much lighter demeanor than Dean had expected.

“Bad news first,” Sam requested, always logical.

“Bad news is, Aether seems to be making headway in the recovery department. We need to be out of here soon.”

“Hold up, how do you have information on Aether?” Dean asked, cocking his head to the side. Mistrusting. Side-eyeing everyone in the room.

Bobby’s gaze fell to Castiel and, if Dean didn’t know any better, he’d say that was a look of approval. He was handing the floor to Cas.

“Somebody wanna fill me in on what the _hell_ is going on?” Dean burst.

Sam looked curious, but not surprised. Bobby and Ellen just waited expectantly for Cas to speak. Dean was about to explode with the anticipation of finding out whatever this weird arrangement was all about. In what world did a traitor get to open his mouth in Bobby’s house?

“Cas?” Dean asked, his voice escalating. They all looked at him like he’d just asked where babies come from.

Cas took a deep breath. Not exasperated like he usually was, but almost indignant to explain himself. “I went to Crowley on my way here this morning.”

Dean blanched, but before he could speak, Cas continued.

“I told him I would spare his life in exchange for daily updates on Aether’s progress. I’m still debating whether or not to keep my word, but for now, his information will be useful.”

Sam was nodding approvingly. Did no one in this room have any sanity left? Yes, Castiel was smart and tactical, but did that automatically make him trustworthy after everything that had happened? Wasn't he technically like a willing hostage? Wasn't he the one who'd gotten Jo into this mess? He worked with Crowley behind their back, and now they were supposed to believe Cas was blackmailing him?

“So what’s the good news?” Dean asked, annoyed.

“Good news is, Jo spoke today for the first time. Coherently. She’s not necessarily responsive.” Ellen’s mood seemed to be suspended in limbo between overwhelming joy that her daughter was back from the dead, and exhaustion. Dean could empathize.

“She’s repeating things, we think.” Bobby supplied, with a comforting hand on Ellen’s forearm.

“Dean Winchester is saved,” Ellen said. “First thing she said this morning, clear as a bell.”

Dean shook his head, uncomprehending.

Ellen shrugged, like she wasn’t sure what it meant either.

“Maybe you should go talk to her, see if she’ll say anything. You too, Sam, but one at a time. We don’t want to overwhelm her.” Ellen, surprisingly, could be soft _and_ protective.

Dean wanted to see Jo. He wanted to see for himself that she was awake and, relatively, okay. But the last time she had seen him, she was screaming for him to stop. He was afraid that he might trigger a memory of that trauma.

“I don’t know if that’s a good –“ 

“Dean Winchester, get your ass in there.”

So not always soft. She could turn spiny pretty quickly. _Just like Jo_ , he thought.

He sat with Jo for an hour after that. She hadn’t screamed when he came in. She stopped rocking herself back and forth, and she glanced up at him every few minutes, as if in disbelief.

This repeated for days. Sam went in after him. They rotated in shifts. Ellen sat with her while she slept, and everyone else took turns while she was conscious (except for Cas, of course, who perched in the sitting room and blew through Bobby’s entire bookshelf). She didn’t look entirely broken or pitiful. She still looked like tough, formidable Jo, just a little marked up.

Sometimes Dean told her stories about them as children. He knew she remembered them. She was there. But he thought it might be a nice reverie. Except that every story he had always came full circle. It always led them back to the fences. Like the old rusty trains on the track. Every story of their lives rattled and creaked around bends and through hills and eventually led straight to Aether.

He found himself trailing off mid-sentence when he realized that he might be getting uncomfortably close to the word “Sentry” or “city” or “lightning”.

He would sit in aching silence after that, tapping his foot or humming an old tune, until his time was up.

One day, he accidentally mentioned a name. It had slipped and he tried to suck it back in from the last syllable to the first like a tangible thing, but it was too late. Jo’s head snapped up at the name, and she spoke.

“Castiel.” The clouds in her eyes seemed to clear.

Dean was sure she hadn’t heard the name before she was taken underground. Unless someone else had said that name to her, she would have only heard it in her time underground. He braced himself for a scream.

“You know him, Jo?”

With perfect clarity, if a slightly unused voice, she repeated something again. “Two days. Lights out. Doors open. Then we run.”

Dean felt stung. Had Castiel said this to her? When he asked, she shook her head.

“Meg,” she whispered.

It had been five days, and Jo was finally responding to a question. He tried to press on.

“Castiel held Meg prisoner… Meg is the one who got you out?”

Jo said nothing.

“Jo, did Meg turn the lights out and get the doors open, somehow? Did Castiel do this to you, Jo?” He said, his hands hovering over her temples where bruises still bloomed in vibrant purple and blue and green.

Nothing. He sat for twenty more minutes, waiting. Nothing.

He stood and left with a huff, slamming the door and immediately regretting the loud noise.

“Dean? Is she well?” Castiel was standing at the arm of the long couch where he slept, alarmed by the slam.

Yeah, no thanks to you. He wanted to say something hurtful. It didn't come out.

Dean hadn’t said more than necessary words to Cas since arriving at Bobby’s. If their private conversations were charged with words unsaid, the ones in a house full of people were drained of words altogether.

Cas caught Dean looking at him a few times on the first day, and since then, Dean had done everything in his power to avoid looking at him at all. Or touching him. Or being in the same room as him.

It was unavoidable now, in the dim-dark, in the fiery chill, with hushed voices upstairs. Two silhouettes danced in proximity to one another, close but never touching, on the wall. Their shadows were thrown there by the flame in the fireplace. They could be anybody. Elongated, crooked bodies, shifting and flickering, nearly kissing when the light was cast just right.

They could be two strangers who had just met. They could be old friends, or lost lovers, or enemies in battle.

Dean spoke to the shadow rather than to the man across the room.

“She’s fine.” His voice came out meek. He cleared his throat and walked upstairs.

“Dean,” he heard, a whisper, and paused for one moment to savor that sound.

He thought of Cas, the man who saved him. Who stood alone with a name on his lips, pleading.

He thought of Castiel, the Sentry who enslaved Meg, who let Jo rot underground. Who felled a nation, compressed it to rubble in his beautiful, terrible fist.

He thought of an absurdly complex chain of events. A chain that wrapped around his neck and pulled tighter everyday, with ambiguity, with questions. And the only people who knew the answers he needed were a silent girl in a small room, rocking and rocking, with her skinny arms wrapped around her legs, and a silhouette, dancing on a deep red wall, never quite close enough to his own.

He held his head down and kept walking up the stairs to the bed where he slept.

 

X

 

On the sixth day, Castiel received a message from Crowley in the tin under a rock. He’d set up his place of correspondence there to keep the location of Bobby’s residence confidential, as a precaution.

_Get out now_ , it read.

Castiel showed it to Bobby when he returned at dawn. They had already had their belongings and provisions packed for days, knowing the message would come sooner than later. Crowley wouldn’t send the message prematurely, because it meant his death might come prematurely. Castiel had made sure to leave the prospect of killing him anyway looming over Crowley’s head.

They loaded the dryad and notified Anna’s guards of the message. They were quiet and sullen, but they seemed to still be under orders from Anael, as if she still accompanied them. Of course, she would have left orders for well after her death. She knew it was her death and she had the foresight of a truly gifted strategist. She would have left the most extensive instructions of her will she could possibly conceive. 

Castiel couldn’t help but think what a vastly different place Aether would have been if they had allowed Anna to lead the Garrison. Like she should have. She was poised to do it. She was a visionary. Brilliant and headstrong and morally driven.  
In the dryad, Dean sat in a corner seat with his head in his hands, not once looking up or speaking to anyone. Jo slept with a warm wool sweater draped around her shoulders, and Ellen and Bobby whispered to one another with their heads bent together. Castiel sat in the back of the cabin where, halfway through, Sam came to sit beside him.

“How ya holding up?” he asked, concerned.

Sam Winchester, always mild tempered and good natured. It was a breath of fresh air just to be near him, sometimes. And always surprising. He didn't seem to maintain any of the hostility Dean had towards him.

“I am… holding up,” Castiel said, unfamiliar with the phrase.

Sam chuckled at him. He didn’t understand the humor in anything.

“And yourself?” Castiel probed.

He shrugged. “I'm okay. Jess couldn’t come. She can’t leave the clinic. It would collapse without her, quite literally.” Sam seemed to both admire and fear Jessica.

“You care about her very much,” Castiel stated. It wasn’t a question, just an observation.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.” Sam picked at a loose screw in the metal seat, blushing.

“Is Dean well?” Castiel asked, glancing at him with concern.

Sam’s mouth was quirked up in the corner as he followed Cas’ gaze to where Dean sat. “He’s not keen on flying.” 

He wished he could comfort him.

“Look, Meg told me… In the underground. She told me what you did.”

Castiel looked down, ashamed of himself.

“I’m so sorry, Sam, I never meant –“

“No. Cas. She told me you meant to save Jo,” he said, suddenly urgent and hushed in his tone. He looked up at Dean in the front of the aircraft, almost frantically apologetic. “And that you meant to do it on your own.”

Cas looked Sam in the eye, searching. Meg told him this before she was murdered. He sorely wished he’d done more for her.  
“We never meant for it to go off,” Sam shook his head vigorously, the deep bruises under his eyes growing darker in his sadness.

“I know.”

“Dean spent weeks making sure it wouldn’t… We never meant for Anna…”

“I know, Sam.” Castiel said, firmly, laying a hand on Sam’s wide shoulder. “The guilt does not belong to you. I am the one who sent the message to Crowley. _‘Aether’s Deliverance Day is a great time to make an impact’._ I cut the power to the city.”

Sam looked stunned, but realization came quickly for him, and Castiel could almost see the gears turning in his mind, could practically hear them clicking into place. He looked up at Dean, where Castiel’s eyes were already trained, and then back to Cas. To Jo, to Dean, and back to Cas again.

Now Sam knew of his hand in the entire event. It was an evil hand with a crushing weight, with splinters and shards that scattered out in every direction, piercing everything in their path. A farther-reaching impact than any bomb of Dean’s making.  
Saying nothing more, Sam got up and walked back to his place in the center of the cabin.

 

When they stepped off the dryad, the people of the Free Territory were lined up on the tarmac, cheering. None of them seemed particularly starved, like the people of Dreck, but none of them were painted and glowing and shining like they would have been at a celebration in Aether. The Free Territory was just a cluster of structures in the dip of sand dunes, but it was far away from the detection of Aether. Leaders of the Garrison had always assumed that, if there was any civilization in the wasteland, it would be far worse than Dreck and nothing to consider at all. They assumed the pollution would kill any population development within a few generations. The pollution from Aether, that is. Pumped out of Aether. Bestowed upon these people like some hand-me-down trinkets. And the waste from the war would be here, too, in animals with glowing eyes and toxic water sources and radioactive rubble scattered around. This was the image Castiel had always harbored of the wasteland, and it was not what he saw now. 

He saw a thriving people, cheering in the wake of a defeat. A victory. A cataclysm that would uproot thousands of people.  
It made him sick to think that the crowd might be celebrating the death of those people inside the Garrison. The death of Anna. Celebrating what he had done.

“You are Castiel,” the guard said, once inside the white room in the central building. The walls were humming, alive with some kind of machine running below them. There was power. Lights overhead, elevators functioning by voice command, and without a lever.

It wasn’t a question, so Castiel only looked at her in silence.

The guard waited, then cleared her throat and pulled an envelope from her clothing of burlap and wires.

_Castiel,_  
If you’re reading this, it means the mission has been a success. The Free Territory welcomes you. Stay as long as you deem necessary. I have given instructions to the guards to show you to your room. I hope you will find it accommodating. Additionally, the Winchesters and their friends are welcome to any vacant houses in the Territory or Guards’ Quarters in the building.  
I always knew you would do the right thing, in the end.  
Until we meet again,  
Anna 

Castiel stared at the letter. How could Anna have known he would be there? Perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps she only made preparations for every possibility and this just happened to be the one that was realized. His eyes read over and over, the words, ‘the right thing’. ‘The right thing’ was murdering his comrades. ‘The right thing’ was sending an entire city full of innocent people into a spiral of chaos.

He stuffed the letter into his suit and looked up at the guards. They were cold towards him, and he didn’t have to guess why that might have been.

One guard with a fox-like demeanor led him to a door above the white room. It was quiet, the walls no longer humming. Wordlessly, she turned the latch and gestured inside.

The walls, floors, and ceilings were concrete. Industrial, not aesthetic. Wires and pipes ran along the ceiling beams and into the walls. The windows weren’t domed like the Garrison, but they were expansive, and they looked west. The rest of the building appeared to have minimal windows, for efficiency and security. This glass wall would have been Anna’s request. The room was large and open, with thick concrete dividing the kitchen (all simple stainless steel, no luxury) from a hallway. There were no photographs or personal mementos. It smelled of bleach. 

Anna used to get chided for saving things. Meaningless things. Bottle caps and dried flowers and cracked porcelain cups and worn out combat boots that didn’t fit anymore. Castiel knew better than to think this sterile place was her design.

He followed the hallway down a few stairs and through a huge stone door. He registered the lack of wood as a building supply here, in contrast to the abundance of it in the Dreck valley. It made everything feel cold, despite the blistering heat in the desert.

The bed was a mattress of substantial size – larger even than his own had been in the Garrison – on a four-post frame of smooth stones stacked together and secured with an adobe grout. It was beautiful, but it looked untouched. Everything in the room looked untouched.

When he stepped back into the hallway, the guard was still there. He assumed he’d have to get used to her presence, as she seemed to be following orders to keep an eye on him. He couldn’t blame them for their mistrust. He didn’t even deserve to be given a place to rest, let alone his own private quarters.

“This room, did it belong to her?” Castiel asked.

She looked like she might have been contemplating a lie, but sighed and nodded her head.

“Did she use it?”

The guard nodded.

“The bedroom, the kitchen, it all looks like it hasn’t been touched. I knew Anna. She made messes. She liked art. She liked music,” Castiel’s voice grew more desperate, cracking on the final word. He could hear it himself, and he wasn’t sure why he seemed to be pleading with this guard for some truth about his lost sister.

The guard looked at him, emotionless, for a long moment.

Just as he started to walk away, abandoning his attempts at getting information from the woman, she spoke.

“Anna slept on the floor, next to the big window. It was the only place she felt comfortable. We tried for months to get her to sleep in her bed, but she finally forbid any further mention of it. And that was that. I have guarded her chambers for nearly a year. She did not make art. She did not play music.” The guard’s face was slowly opening, more sullen, more available.

And just like that, again, Anna broke his heart. The way she always could. He pictured her feeble frame that held such an imposing spirit, curled on the floor, cold and alone and small. Everything about the little girl with copper hair had been ripped from her in the tunnels underneath the Garrison.

“What is your name?”

“Artemis. Sir. Like the goddess.” She looked almost proud.

“Artemis. I’m afraid I don’t know the myth. You’ll have to tell me someday. And as for me, Castiel will do.” He tried to turn his lips up in a smile, but it felt awkward and tight, so he let it drop.

She stared back at him, her sleek black hair falling across her forehead and shadowing her eyes. The exchange between them wasn’t easy. He didn’t have Dean’s charm or Sam’s command of casual language. He never would. 

 

That evening, as he shuffled through drawers and shelves for any sign of the Anna he knew, there was a knock on the door.  
Castiel froze. He didn’t stand or ask for a name. In the Garrison, his intercom would have announced the visitor..  
The knock grew more persistent.

He approached the door in expert silence and laid his ear to it. The cold stone slab didn’t allow much sound through, but he could hear a slight shuffling on the other side. Maybe even heavy breathing.

When the knocking came again, he jumped.

“Cas! Open up, damnit!”

Dean. Dean was here. He had finally snapped. He was coming to kill Castiel. Something inside his chest cavity flipped and fluttered and a strange calm overcame him. It would be a just way to die. All would be right in the universe.

He opened the door wide, mustering every ounce of bravery he had left. He found that it was a surprising amount.   
Dean stood in the threshold, his hands in his pockets, shifting his weight from side to side. He wasn’t looking at Castiel.

“Hello, Dean?” Cas said; it came out as a weak, empty question and fell limp on the floor between them, no buoyancy in the thick atmosphere that always seemed to hold them, outside of time and place; a vacuum.

“Why didn’t you just tell me, Cas?” Dean said to his shoes.

Tell him what? That the bomb had been his idea, in some strange round-about way? Tell him about the plan? Tell him that Jo was alive all along?

“I couldn’t,” he supplied, still unsure what he was responding to. His answer seemed fitting for any question, regardless. He just couldn’t.

When Dean finally looked up, his eyes were smoldering. Against the slate grey and white of the room, those eyes were the greenest thing he’d ever known. They were the missing color in the washed-out room. The art that belonged on the walls. The warmth that had been so absent from the place. Because they burned.

Relentlessly, they burned. Castiel backed into the room, and Dean followed, swinging the stone door closed behind himself without looking away.

Castiel tried to think of his last words. He knew he had them. He was trained to say something if ever he was killed. Something about the eternal endurance of Aether, the great nation. He couldn’t remember now. It didn’t matter much.  
He couldn’t plead for his life. He couldn’t fight back. He had no right to do that. He’d already resolved to die with honor and peace. He would do the right thing, in the end. 

This was the end.

And, somehow, as if Dean’s eyes were a mirror to his own, he knew exactly what Dean would find there: fear and admiration.  
He steeled himself and stopped taking steps backwards. Dean was still advancing on him, still, those eyes, burning.  
When Dean came close enough, Castiel could swear he felt the buzzing around his skin, the way the grid felt beneath his feet in the city. Like voltage coursed through him and voltage coursed through Dean, and when they were near, they reached for contact, illuminating bright, jagged paths through the air on their way to one another. To greater power, and extinguishment.

He closed his eyes and breathed in, knowing it would be his last. He could smell Dean, so close. Dust and metal and earth and sky. He thought it would be better not to know where to expect pain, from which part of his body his life would leave him. Dean didn’t seem the type to beat him to death with his bare hands, but perhaps the rage had accumulated enough for that. He seemed more likely to shoot him, but he didn’t need to be so close for that. Perhaps a blade. To the throat? The stomach? The heart?

And just as Castiel braced himself, certain that the blade would, in fact, go in through his back….

The human body anticipates sensation. It prepares itself to feel or not to feel. For pain, it numbs itself. Goes into shock in order to avoid agony. This is involuntary. A function of the parasympathetic nervous system. Our flesh is clever that way. Castiel learned this in early training. When we are dying, we almost never know. Sentries are trained to always know. To override this function. To greet their death as it takes them. To know the degree to which dying hurts.

So when Castiel felt lips against his, hot and hesitant, instead of cold metal splitting his skin, it came as a sharp wound anyway. A quick death. Followed by a slow death. A sobbing, begging coward’s death. And then a valiant death, willing and forceful. And then a martyr’s death of absolute surrender. A weary death, an old pair of lungs struggling for one more breath.  
Each kiss, a blade. The two terrible, merciless gods giving life and taking it away. And the two violent lightning bolts colliding in midair and searing everything in their path. A great storm, building static and releasing fury again and again until the gods trembled at the damage the other had done: admiration and fear.


	16. Now Touched

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter that earns the work's explicit rating...

"This is where the evening splits in half ... Love or death. Grab an end, pull hard, and make a wish." - Richard Siken

 Ellen chose a small but clean adobe house tucked away behind the central building. It had three bedrooms, so Jo and Bobby could each stay there as well, but Dean didn’t ask about their arrangement. He’d just nodded to them as they’d parted ways, smiling at Jo with shame and that same relief that had been holding everything up, suspended, so it didn’t hurt yet. Because he was too relieved that they’d survived for anything to hurt yet.

Sam chose a little bungalow near the hospital. It was much better than the one in Dreck and Dean knew he would fill his days learning and healing. Just like Dean, Sam wanted to return to the valley as soon as he could. To Jess, Dean guessed. And she knew the truth now, because it didn’t matter anymore. The seams of their life had split and anyone remotely close to them would have felt it. So Dean knew that Sam, too, had all of his hurt suspended above him, in the relief that Jess knew the truth and still wanted to help him. He just hoped to any gods that gave a damn that it didn’t all fall at once.

He decided he would let Sam keep his weird hours, working into the night, when the most people tended to need medical assistance, and stay out of his hair if he wasn’t needed. Sam had dealt with Dean’s neuroticism enough in the past weeks. Sam had seen Dean fall apart more than anyone else, no matter how many people he patched up, how many broken bones he would set in all his life, Sam would never fix anyone the way he did Dean, and no one would ever owe Sam a greater debt, or a greater apology than Dean, who didn’t do his one job. He was supposed to be the one picking his little brother up when he fell. He was supposed to be the one teaching him to walk before he ran. And he did all of those things, in the literal sense, when they were younger. But somewhere along the way, Sam became more sure-footed, more stable, a better navigator, and Dean… well Dean went off and got his heart tangled up in an electric fence with a high-ranking Sentry and nearly got himself and everyone he loved killed. He wasn’t sure how it had happened, but no one, not even Dean, could deny at this point that Sam had his shit together a little more securely. So Dean resigned himself to the family failure, and let his little brother go, saving lives and falling in love the simple, wholesome way.

Dean didn’t really put himself anywhere. He dropped his things in a small shack on the far outskirts of the Territory, where they’d crawled through the fences the first time, but it was a restless night.

He paced the dusty floor, muttering to his shadow in the dull lamplight, until just before the stroke of midnight when he slipped out into the vacant, ungoverned desert, knowing to avoid the shock fences. He tried not to think. To just be. Of course, all he did was run his mind in circles.

_Clear your head, just breathe, where is Cas right now, is Jo doing alright, did I remember to bring my tooth brush, stop thinking damnit, Dean… Would Cas be awake right now? No, stop, stop thinking._

Twenty minutes later, he was in the little den at Sam’s place, parked at a makeshift table of old tires and broken slate, cleaning his guns. He poured himself a finger of whiskey. Like the good ole’ days. Sam sat across the table with sleep-bleary eyes, eyeing the glass on the table with disapproval, watching Dean’s hands move and shift around parts of the gun, snapping and clicking metal together and apart again.

Dean grunted out a “no” before Sam even got half way through his question about whether or not Dean had gone to see Cas. If Sam cared so much, why didn’t _he_ just go see him?

“You’re the only one who hasn’t had a conversation with him in weeks,” Sam chided.

“You don’t know that.” Dean recalled the strange, broken sentences between them in the cabin, the night before they left for Bobby’s. How disjointed everything had been. He remembered being on his knees, unable to house so much rage and relief at once. It had been like a membrane around the cabin, the two of them encased inside, like insects inside resin. Suspended and at peace when they should have been fighting to the death, swinging their venomous tails and snapping their pincers. Dean had always been a little more violently inclined than the average person. He wasn’t sure what it was about Castiel that pacified his anger, turned it into a cold, sinking feeling instead. Like he’d rather throw himself into the ocean, chained to an anchor, than take a swing at Cas. Even when he deserved it, the son of a bitch.

But Sam, of course, was right. The only time he’d spoken in full sentences to Cas, he’d been relaying a story that wasn’t his own. In a way, that was enough. They’d always said plenty to one another in a cryptic rhetoric. Sam’s raised eyebrow told Dean that yes, Sam _did_ know that. And Dean knew it, and everyone else in the world knew it.

He couldn’t let this crap go on; being treated like a child when he was obviously the only one with any common sense left. Castiel was a traitor to Aether, yes. If they sent him back, he would be ganked or guillotined, Dean was sure of it. And that wasn’t something he even wanted to consider doing. But Castiel was also a traitor to them, and everyone seemed to be forgetting it. Even himself, on occasion.

“What happened to the days when _you_ were the one trying to convince _me_ that Cas had ulterior motives, huh?” Dean asked. “Everything you guessed about him was right, and now? It’s not important anymore?”

“I was wrong.” Sam put it so simply. He was wrong. Everything was wrong. But if Sam was wrong about Cas, that meant Dean was right, and Dean was _definitely not_ right.

Dean shook his head stiffly in rejection. He couldn’t accept that answer. Sam knew something he didn’t. Sam Winchester didn’t just admit to being wrong unless there was blatant evidence the show for it.

“Sam, you were the only person who had any clue. What gives, man?”

There was a long silence in which Dean and Sam both stared at each other with absolute exasperation. Like neither of them could believe the other really didn’t have anything to say. Dean couldn’t imagine what kind of revelation Sam could have possibly had about Cas that he had missed out on. 

“Dean, I’m not going to fill in the gaps for you. You _know_ why Cas didn’t tell you Jo was alive. You _know_ why he didn’t tell you he was going back to Aether. You’re just being selective about the facts because you got your feelings hurt,” said Sam Winchester, Burn Master.

Dean stared at Sam, dumbfounded. Slack-jawed.

“And Cas!” Sam scoffed. “You’re both just stubborn. He’s too humble and you’re too blind. I’m not fixing this for you, Dean, and I’m not letting you mope around here either.”

Sam was getting harsh. In the way that only Sam can be towards Dean. He looked indignant and scowled for a solid minute, but in the end, he knew Sam was right. He wasn’t sure what holes there were to fill, but wherever they were in the grand scheme, they were huge and gaping and empty, and he had to figure out where the missing pieces fit. Why hadn’t Cas told him Jo was alive? Why hadn’t Cas told him he was going back to Aether? What did everyone else know that he didn’t? And why was he the last to know?

He tucked his weapons back around himself, and stomped out of Sam’s house, begrudgingly. He left his whiskey on the table, untouched.

He imagined himself going to Castiel, vocalizing these questions. Forcing them up his throat. He cringed. Not happening.

He wandered the Territory until he got to Ellen’s. Maybe he’d always been headed there, but lantern light shone from inside, so he knew someone was awake. He reached to tap on the door, but it opened just before his knuckles made it.

It was Jo. Wrapped in a warm throw, clutching it around her at the collar, and holding the lantern in her other hand. She seemed unfazed by Dean’s shock, to see her standing and functioning, as she carefully and quietly stepped out of the house, throwing a teasing smile over her shoulder.

She gestured for Dean to follow her and headed straight to the central building without looking back.

“Jo, wait up!” Dean said in the loudest whisper he could manage.

She continued to walk, and Dean was suddenly concerned that she was sleepwalking.

When he caught up to her, though, she turned around and put her finger to his lips to quiet him. Her eyes were still weary and bruised, but she looked fully awake.

They reached the main entrance of the central building. The massive metal doors Dean had stood beside with Anna when she gave them the grand tour of her place. When she flung her arms out and beamed as the doors slid open and the massive generator inside was revealed. He remembered thinking how like Jo she was, when Jo was on her best behavior, and he was overcome with the saddest kind of Déjà vu. When one person replaces another, and it’s not quite the same image, but close.

“Jo, it’s locked. You can’t go in right now,” Dean warned. And then he stopped dead in his tracks when Jo lifted her hand to touch the door. The light on the lockbox beside it turned green and the huge chunks of metal opened as if by whim.

He balked at her. “How did you….?”

Jo smiled sheepishly and nodded her head inside.

Once inside, Jo found a rubber-coated wire that would have corresponded with a smaller branch of the huge generator, all its parts turning and pumping and jittering, and ripped it from its socket, exposing the metal slivers of copper inside. She wrapped her hand around it.

“Watch, Dean. Watch.”

He forced himself to stay in place, despite the fact that she could electrocute herself at any moment.

Her eyes began to glow blue, just like one of Castiel’s when they’d first met, but there was no Audium clipped to her ear. Her deep brown eyes glowed blue from the inside, and Jo’s attention was grabbed by something Dean couldn’t see as she followed it through the air. Dean leaned closer and saw, on her cornea, the tiny image projected, and stared in amazement.

“What do you see, Jo?” he asked.

“You. And all the information Aether has on you, which, lucky for you, isn’t much,” Jo answered. Like Ellen said, clear as a bell.

She was speaking. Fully. Responding. Attentive. 

“And I can see all the information on this generator.” She said, breathy, her eyes darting to the different gears and tanks. “Its voltage and the direction and usage of all parts of it. Where the power is going and who is using it and for what. And I can see the grid, flickering.” Her smile fell to something like dread and fear.

“The grid? From Aether?” Dean asked.

“It woke me up, the buzzing. It’s annoying as hell but it’s fascinating. It’s just starting to come back on and I can see the patterns under the city lighting up block by block.” Jo’s voice started to shake as if she, too, were in awe of what she could see.

“So the thing they did to you down here, it really worked,” Dean mused.

The experiments they did in the underground weren’t just botched attempts by mad scientists, after all. They were more like evil geniuses. Dean couldn’t imagine how they managed to rig a device that could pick up on Aether’s grid activity from fifty miles away, let alone implant that device in someone’s head and enable kinetic and neurological commands.

She nodded, her eyes faraway. “I’m a freak now. So be it.”

“You always were,” Dean said, leaning to nudge her in the ribs. She cringed back, and Dean winced for her, sympathetically. He gave her an apologetic look, and the joke fell flat.  
“I’m sorry, Jo. I never told you that. I’m sorry that I got you caught, and that I didn’t come back for you.”

“I don’t believe that for one second,” Jo said, sounding more like the old Jo than anything else she’d said. “I made a friend in there, you know. Meg.” She started to wander around the generator room, craning her neck up in the glowing light.

“Yeah, I’m sorry about her, too. Cas locked her up in there,” he said bitterly, shaking his head mostly to himself. That was another part of the puzzle he couldn’t quite place, no matter how he turned it.

“Castiel,” Jo said, like a command. Dean looked up to see her eyes faraway again and realized she was watching a projection. She must have pulled up his file. “He was in line to supervise the entire Garrison in the next five years, before he was reported missing the night of the accident.”

Dean thought of Castiel’s fist wrapped in the neckline of his shirt, grunting words through his teeth. I gave up everything. For you. So he gave up what would have been arguably the highest position of authority on the planet. So what?

“You think he’ll go back? Resume his place as Commander Cas and obliterate us all?” Dean asked, half-joking. But really, he didn’t know how else to breach the subject. Jo was the only person to whom he could voice his wariness towards Cas, the only person who hadn’t shot him down.

Jo looked properly confused, and squinted at him. She was really looking at Dean this time, not through him. Some distant realization seemed to come crashing into her consciousness and she barked a laugh at him.

“You really don’t know, do you?”

_Not you, too._

Dean decided not to explode with anger. Not at Jo. He just threw his hands up in the air, a gesture of surrender, an invitation to supply him with whatever holy grail of information he was missing.

Jo began with an almost pitying expression, crossing the room towards him again. She laid her hand on his upper arm, and the grip was stronger than he would have expected. 

“Castiel is not going to go back to Aether.” She shook her head and spoke slowly, as if explaining to a child, and Dean had never ever felt more childish. “In fact, I’d be willing to bet he’ll stick around for quite some time if you let him.”

Dean looked up at the tall ceiling, aware that Cas was located somewhere in that direction, on a higher floor in the central building. Somehow, he felt elated to hear an affirmation from another source, despite the fact that Jo had given him no evidence.

“And why should I let him?” Dean’s voice rattled, wavered as if it were walking a tight-rope twenty stories high. There was an answer. He could feel it. He had always felt it. It was right there, if he could just figure out the right questions to ask, the right doors to open. There were so many.

Jo rolled her eyes with great exaggeration.

“He brought Meg in so he could get to the underground without looking suspicious. He sent me messages through Meg. When he cut the power, the two of us were supposed to run to the Anarch. Meg was going to take the hellhound and kill Crowley and we were going to get away with it all.” A smile started to crawl across her face. It wasn’t a happy smile, but the kind of smile people exchange at a funeral.

Castiel hadn’t worked with Crowley. He’d worked with Meg. Suddenly, Dean had never been happier to be the villain of the story. He would gladly take that role if it meant he was wrong. If it meant he could be the idiot, he could be made a fool of. That was okay, somehow, in a way he would have hated before, in any other circumstances. He so desperately wanted to be wrong, and that was a foreign concept to him.

“And it all would have worked if I hadn’t shown up with a bomb.” Dean started to share the funeral-smile as well. There was almost an optimism to his sentence.

“That’s where you’re wrong. I don’t think Castiel ever planned on surviving that night. Meg told him about the bomb. He wanted it. He wanted to destroy Aether that night, Dean. All of it, not just the Garrison. He just never wanted _you_ to be there.”  
That would explain being sent into the desert to search for him for days; a diversion, a decoy, all foiled by the fact that they found Anna and the Free Territory. Dean nodded his head slowly, his brows knit together, as if the realization was coming to him very, very gradually, but hadn’t arrived yet.

“You dumbass,” Jo chuckled, humorless. “You kept him alive. He kept you alive. And he planned to blow up an entire city to do it.”

The greek myths were never accurate historical accounts. The gods could never reconcile between themselves who was good and who was not. In Zeus’ story, his giant of a father is the villain. To Prometheus, it’s Zeus. To Persephone, it’s Hades. Dean began to understand why, there in that generator room with the walls humming and glowing and vibrating, giant plates of iron and steel covering everything. Why he could never figure Castiel out. Why he hated him and wanted to keep him near, wanted to tear him to pieces and fix his every ailment, wanted to wrap his arms around his neck and wring it all simultaneously. 

Because Castiel was the kind of person who would save his life numerous times, who would give up his future to do so, but who would destroy countless other lives in the process. Turn his home inside out to get Jo out of the underground (Jo, who Castiel had never even met but knew Dean cared about). He was also the kind of person to ask a hooker where her father was, to look at constellations at night, to offer to starve himself in the wasteland so as to not be a burden. And these weren’t puzzle pieces that snapped together. They were just a scattered mess that somehow made up Dean’s perception of Cas, like a crystalline prism, every facet throwing a different array of light.

“You trusted him too easily. Now you’re trying to reel yourself back in and you’re not _seeing_ it, Dean. What everyone else is seeing. I didn’t particularly like being stuck down there, and I know you would have come for me, but you would have been killed for trying. I know that. You know that. And _Castiel_ knew that,” on the last name, she squeezed into his arm, almost painfully, like she was trying to convey something other than what she was saying.

“I’ve gotta run, Jo. You go get some sleep, alright?” Dean ruffled her hair and kissed the top of her head. “It’s good to have you back.” 

As he took off in a sprint towards the elevator, Jo just shoved him weakly in that direction, an encouragement. Dean didn’t want to think about what that meant, or why his ears were hot when he reached the sliding door.

“Oh and, Dean?” Jo said, looking away from him, staring up at the blue light coming from a warped seam in the generator walls. Dean turned. Jo couldn’t see, but she knew. “Ask him. Ask him why he did it all.”

Once inside the elevator, he realized he didn’t have any clue which floor Castiel was on. The little metal box didn’t ask you which floor you were going to, like the ones in Aether. It just listened.

“Uh… Ten….Tenth floor?”

The elevator didn’t budge. He cleared his throat.

“Tenth floor,” he said with authority and assertiveness.

It jolted upward.

When he stepped off, there was a guard at the door. He had dark-tanned skin that was tinted grey in the artificial light humming on a string above him, flickering. 

Dean straightened his shoulders and tried to look like he belonged there. “Have you seen a man about yea high,” he gestured around his ears, “dark hair, blue eyes…” He trailed off.  
The man just stared at him, squinting.

“Goes by the name of Castiel.”

The guard tilted his chin up and looked down his nose at Dean, as if he might shoo him away. Dean tried to avoid fidgeting with his hands, so he adjusted the worn collar of his tattered jacket, trying to look professional.

“Up one more level.”

The next floor was very different from the one below it. The vibrations of the generator were barely detectable from so far up. At the elevator, there was another guard. She was tall and lean with jet black hair and blue eyes. She was pretty.

“What is your business here?” she asked, positioning herself directly in front of Dean.

“I’m a, uh, friend… of Castiel’s.” He tried to shift around her but she matched his movements.

“Do you know the hour, sir?”

“No clue, _ma’am_.” He didn’t say it the way he did to Ellen. He said it with snark, and that apparently was not received well by this guard.

“Castiel is not expecting any visitors,” she said through the same squinty eyes the man downstairs gave him. What the hell would he have to do to just speak to the guy?

“Sorry I didn’t send a pigeon, but could you at least go tell your master Dean would like a word with him?”

Her expression shifted, and she took a step back.

“You’re the Winchester?” she asked, as if she had expected something much better to have such a distinguished title. Personally, Dean had no idea what Winchester meant in these parts, but in the valley, it just meant trouble.

“One of ‘em, yeah.” He beamed his best smile. The one he used to get his way.

“By all means, I… sorry. Go ahead, it’s the door at the end of the hall.” She seemed to be fumbling with her words and Dean was positive his winning smile wasn’t _that_ effective. He definitely appreciated the newfound power in his last name, but he didn’t want to think about why he might have earned that respect. The people here would, of course, take a liking to the man who built the bomb that sent their enemy screaming from their safe, comfortable homes, skittering for their valuables and their children.

He thought of what they might have taken with them as they left. When none of their devices worked, when nothing lit up or told them the weather anymore, what did they take? Family heirlooms? Dean couldn’t remember ever seeing an old chest or an antique china set in anyone’s home in Aether. He didn’t remember seeing a bookshelf, or a stack of journals, an old family recipe taped to the inside of a cabinet. What did the people of Aether have now? How much had they lost? How much did Cas really give up? If he lost his Audium, he had nothing left but whatever his memory provided.

“Cas! Open up, damnit!” Dean yelled on the second knock. He immediately regretted his loud tone, and glanced over his shoulder at the guard down the hall. She was gone.  
The large stone door whooshed open and Castiel stood there, the moon hanging behind him, eclipsed like a halo, where it shone through a wall of windows.

“Hello, Dean.”

Those two words were worth every bit of trouble it took to get to him. Dean realized, then, that despite all that trouble, he hadn’t thought once about what it was exactly he wanted to _say_ to Cas once he found him. He’d felt an urgent need to speak to him, and now, standing in the threshold, words would not come.

Did he have a statement? Did he have a question? There were too many. All the charged words and drained words seemed to swirl to a typhoon here in this doorway and they nearly swept Dean away, running back to the elevator, back out of the building, into the desert. Anywhere that didn’t require him to swallow his pride and just ask.

“Why didn’t you just tell me, Cas?” It wasn’t the right question, but it was a start. 

Dean took a step forward. Cas took a step back.

“I couldn’t.”

Two more steps, and Cas stopped moving, planting his feet firmly and squaring his shoulders. He stared Dean in the eye as he kept advancing.

Dean wasn’t sure what he’d do when he reached Cas, but not a single cell in his body wanted to stop until he got there.

Finally, with the last step before their bodies brushed against one another, Castiel’s eyes slid closed. He tilted his chin up, baring his throat, and his fists were balled up at his sides.  
Dean paused, looking down at them. He saw on Cas’ wrists and forearms ghost-faint pink crescents from when his nails dug in. Dean wrapped his thumbs and forefingers around them, ghost-faint touches, as an apology, and then, as if it were the natural next step, as if nothing else could have possibly come after, he pressed his mouth to Castiel’s. He hovered there, hesitant, ghost-faint contact, feeling the pull of their bodies to one another. It was nearly tangible, magnetic.

Castiel winced, and gasped, and Dean pulled away just enough to watch him. Still screwed shut, a tiny drop of moisture rolled from the crinkled corner of one eye. Dean watched it streak down to the dip of Castiel’s mouth and then caught it on his own lips. Sharing the taste of salt and sorrow, they collided, like their atoms reorganized and remolded for the shape of the other. Every kiss was a novelty, like they were a different pair of strangers each time they pulled apart. Desperate open mouths one time, ravenous teeth and tongues the next, brushes of hands and cheeks scorching and soothing. So much friction, they’d thin out and out like flint until they were fragile, thin pieces of nothing. And not enough friction, not nearly enough.

Dean’s hands wound into the short hair at the nape of Castiel’s neck, and Castiel’s raked gently down Dean’s ribs, leaving chills wherever they went.

“Cas,” Dean mumbled into his shoulder. Cas still wore his Sentry suit, but it was new. All the silver was back in its place, and the blue-tinged-black surface was smooth and clean again. Dean couldn’t help but follow the swells of muscle underneath the skin-tight suit, tailor-made for his lean body. He also wore a cloak of burlap and wires, like the guards in the Territory wore. Buried in Cas’ neck, Dean could smell the musky, dense scent of the burlap textile and the sharp metallic scent of the silver that lined Castiel’s neck and collar.  
“Cas,” Dean said again, more insistent.

Castiel’s fine shaking calmed slightly as he hummed his reply into Dean’s chest.  
“Jo’s awake,” Dean said. “Like, actually awake.”

Cas moved to fit his nose into the hollow below Dean’s left ear. Keeping his voice low, he asked, “How is she?”

“She’s alright. She’s amazing,” Dean laughed lightly. “That thing they did to her, the Audium implant, it actually worked.”

“Hmm?” Cas mumbled.

“She didn’t realize it in the valley because Bobby didn’t have electricity and the grid was down, but she can see it now. It’s coming back on and she can see it from here, Cas, isn’t that crazy?” He brought Jo into the conversation, and now he could hear her voice echoing around the walls of his skull. _Ask him, ask him._ But Dean couldn’t ask him, yet.   
“Will it hurt her?” Cas pulled back enough to look into Dean’s eyes. His were so clear and so blue. Dark, dark blue-tinged-black in the shadowy room with the moon boasting behind him.

“Didn’t seem like it. She could open the doors. She could control the generator downstairs. And she was coherent enough to talk some sense into me,” Dean added with a playful smile on his face, carding his fingers through the hair above Cas’ ear as he laid his head back against Dean’s chest.

“You are a senseless man,” Cas said, seeming unsurprised at the advancement of Aether’s torture tactics, and unconcerned with Dean’s lack of sense.

Dean couldn’t hear the smile in his voice, but he had learned to detect when Cas made an attempt at humor. This was one of those times. But he didn’t know how right he was.  
“I owe you an apology,” Dean said. He knew that saying ‘I owe you an apology’ was not the same as actually apologizing, and that he would eventually have to figure out how to do the latter.

“You owe me nothing, Dean Winchester.”

“Cas, I didn’t speak to you for days when I should have been thanking you. I can be a real pain in the ass, like, all the time, you know.”

“And I left you to nearly kill yourself, you and Sam both, in the desert. I didn’t know that Anna was here. I never would have done that if I had known you’d travel fifty miles. You could have suffered severe dehydration. And I never would have led you this way if I had known it would have ended with you being asked to build a bomb…If you are a pain in the ass, then I am…Dean, I…” Castiel looked as his own hands, held in front of them both. Dean saw something so precious there, and he knew Cas didn’t.

Dean could tell that Cas was getting worked up thinking about the absurd stack of things that had gone terribly wrong in his master plan, of all the treachery he very nearly unleashed. He imagined Cas’ relief that it hadn’t happened. That hundreds, thousands maybe, were not dead by his hand. Dean felt it, too. Knew it well. Knew that Cas had his hurt suspended above him in the wake of how much worse it could have been.

“Shhh, hey. I already figured that out. Took me long enough,” Dean huffed. “But I know what you did. For Jo and for Meg and for me. And if you hadn’t been so damn stubborn--”

Cas grabbed Dean’s jaw and said, his lips brushing against Dean’s, “If I hadn’t been so damn stubborn, I would have done this.” He laid his mouth flush on top of Dean’s. “And this.”

Cas moved far differently this time, lightly where it had been nearly abrasive before. Calmly where it had been frantic and fearful. His hands slid from Dean’s cheeks to the vulnerable skin on the underside of his jaw, where his pulse was strongest. He felt Cas’ fingers press there, searching for the throb of blood in his veins, and he smiled into the kiss.

“Am I gonna live, Cas?” Dean asked, for old time’s sake.

Cas pulled away, seeming surprised at Dean’s repetition of that phrase, an expression similar to what Dean must have had when he was shocked by the electric fence. There was something determined and terrifying in Castiel’s eyes as he mulled over his reply. Dean watched an answer form behind Cas’ lips, keeping his eyes trained on them, smiling at the fact that Cas was putting so much thought into a rhetorical question, just as he had the first time. Dean leaned into Cas’ neck, watching his breath dance across the short hair behind his ear. Eventually, after Dean’s mouth had made its way from Cas’ ear to his Adam’s apple, his voice rumbled against Dean’s lips, and it sent shivers all the way to his fingertips, the fine hairs on the back of his neck stood, and his jeans were suddenly just a bit too snug.

X

“Yes. You’ll live.” Castiel’s voice came out strained and oxygen-deprived, his head tilted back to give Dean access and his fingers fumbling around Dean’s jacket, a clumsy attempt to pull it off.

Dean would live. It was over, and Dean _had_ lived. It was not until this moment that Castiel comprehended that. There had never been any other option but Dean’s survival, and Sam’s survival, and Jo’s survival. But somehow, he’d never been optimistic enough to really believe it would come to pass.

Now, not only was Dean alive, but he was doing things to Castiel’s neck that he felt in his toes, and in his knee caps, and at the base of his spine. The nerves in Castiel’s body were so greedy for Dean’s touch that they seemed to relocate to his neck and ears and lips, following Dean’s mouth wherever it went. With each kiss, every single nerve sparked, inviting all of the blood to rush there and heighten the sensation. He closed his eyes and listened to the sound of his lungs and Dean’s lungs, no longer wheezing or rattling at all, of the tiny bristling sounds of Dean’s stubble on his skin, of the rustle of cotton under sweaty, shaking hands.

When his grappling with the thin, tattered fabric of Dean’s jacket seemed to be getting them no where, Dean grabbed his wrists. It must have been a habit of Dean’s, always holding his fingers right where the bones and veins protruded together. Cas couldn’t say he minded it. Dean pushed Castiel backwards, his shoulders hitting the wall that led down the long corridor with a thud, and his breath rushed out, more out of surprise than force. 

Castiel looked down at the place where Dean held his wrists, and Dean’s eyes followed the movement. The rough, calloused fingers slackened and slid down so that they cupped the back of Castiel’s hands, his thumb cradled in Castiel’s palms. He rubbed his thumbs in little circles and then, without breaking contact, ran his hand around to flatten his palm against Castiel’s, aligning their fingers. Cas’ were longer, thinner, paler. Dean’s were strong and bronzed and trembling lightly as he tucked his fingers into the gaps between Castiel’s.  
“I always held your wrists because I couldn’t do this,” Dean whispered, watching their hands respond to each other’s, his green eyes full of an odd fascination. He couldn’t tell if it was the darkness of the hallway, shadowed from the moonlight, or if Dean’s eyes were flickering.

“I wouldn’t have minded.”

Keeping his hands and eyes locked with Dean’s, Castiel pushed off from the wall and backed down the corridor, slowly, aligning one foot behind the heel of the other, towards the room at the end.

Dean raised one eyebrow and a smile crept onto his swollen lips.

“Gonna give me the grand tour, Cas?”

Castiel was not planning on giving Dean the grand tour. And he knew the look Dean got that meant Castiel should hold his tongue, because there was a reference he wouldn’t understand. So he stayed silent and serious and didn’t let his eyes leave Dean’s for one second, thinking of what he _would_ give him. What he could give him. Castiel was unsure of himself, unsure of his hands, but he tried not to convey that.

When his back reached the large stone door, he stopped and waited, observing Dean’s microexpressions, and movements, everything. He watched Dean swallow, the column of his throat moving up and then back, his eyes darting to Castiel’s lips and to his eyes again. He saw Dean nod, just a minute movement, barely detectable, but it was there, an assurance for himself or for Castiel, or both. He nodded back, taking a deep breath, and pressed into the door to reveal the glass wall just as big as the one in the den and the bed that might have been about four times the size of Dean’s in the cabin. The surfaces all smooth, different values of grey, washed in a pool of moonlight that seemed to illuminate the stark white covers on the bed, untouched.

It wasn’t the first time Cas and Dean stood across from one another in a dark room. But it was the first time they stood across from one another in a dark room with one bed, untouched. With each other’s flavor on their lips and their chests rising and falling with anticipation. Alone.

Their hands dropped away from entanglement as silence rose up to choke them, with its gnarled hands and its grimace. This silence that had taken Dean from him before, with its secrets and its betrayal, Castiel hated it. He felt it there, the same silence that lingered over his shoulder like a hungry, ugly vulture when he had knelt beside Dean’s sleeping form and begged for forgiveness. When his mouth formed the words, and nothing came out. He hated it and he couldn’t break it now, in the room with them, circling over their heads, waiting to scavenge whatever was left of them. Where the atmosphere had been one of relief and laughter before, it was now worried and frayed and apprehensive, and the shadows in the corners of the room were vultures, laughing but inaudible.

_What happens now?_ thought Cas, worrying that everything would dissipate now that it was within reach, like fog.

Where the charged words and the drained words swirl together, in this room, where questions and answers come together and wishes and doubts come together, where fire meets fuse, what happens?

The answer was obvious, Castiel concluded. They come together, too. They don’t have to be consumed by the silence. They had always been swirling around and around and around, gradually slipping closer, and this is where they finally come together. Where they were always going to merge.

Dean surveyed the room. A small, dim lantern burned on a slate table near the bed. Castiel preferred the warm firelight to the buzzing, fluorescent blue-white, but the moon was so bright, just at the right height to peek into their window, illuminating them, it hardly needed assistance.

With his heart in his throat, absorbing any words that threatened to come up, Castiel crossed the room to Dean, who looked out the window, eclipsing the moon with his silhouette. He stood beside Dean, and saw that together, they threw long, still shadows across the bed, like lovers lying together in the night. He placed both of his palms on the center of Dean’s back and ran them in opposite directions down his now bare arms. When he got to Dean’s hands, he lifted them and placed them flat on the window, blowing a puff of hot air over each hand where he laid it, so a cloud of fog would trace Dean’s handprint onto the glass. He pressed Dean’s hands firmly to let him know he wanted them to stay there. Dean listened. Without a word, Dean listened, and the laughing silence started to retreat, and the entire room sighed and relaxed around them, not as stifling anymore.

Then, Cas dropped to a kneel behind Dean and reached around the front of his legs to untie his boot laces. Dean craned his neck around to try to look at Castiel, but kept his hands pressed to the window.

Cas slipped off Dean’s boot and sock, slowly, reverently, looking up at Dean through bowed lashes. He laid the knife that had been tucked into the sock on the floor beside Dean and then pressed a kiss to the knobby bone on the outside of his ankle. He repeated the same thing on the other side, and then ran his hands upwards along the outer seam to the back pockets of Dean’s blue, frayed, grass-stained pants. Dean shifted but kept his feet planted.  
When he reached Dean’s waist, he felt a long, thin gun poking out from the leather band of his belt. Castiel pulled that out and laid it next to the knife. Neither of them said anything about the cache of weapons. It was something they both knew and had and would never leave home without. Part of being a soldier. Cas pulled his Ignaparum out of his combat boots and set it down next to Dean’s weapons, looking up into Dean’s eyes all the while. It was a gesture of absolute trust, and it came so easily, Castiel’s wavering smile broke into a sudden, erupting laugh. Weapons do something to the air, the same way lightning does. The room buzzes and swells, calling attention to the constant threat of danger sitting on the tile floor in the moonlight. But as Castiel’s laugh tore up his throat, a foreign sensation to him, Dean kept his eyes on him. And they never slid to the guns and knives. And they never looked worried or panicked, the way everyone else had always looked at Castiel, all his life, because he was a Sentry, and because he wielded a gun.

Castiel eventually subdued his laughter by pressing his lips into Dean’s hip, muffling the sound until it died. Dean’s eyes held him where his hands couldn’t, still pinned to the window.

He wrapped his hands around to the front of Dean’s pants and undid the belt buckle and the buttons on the fabric. Dean’s weight had waned considerably in the past few weeks, and his jeans slipped from his hips easily without the belt to hold them. He lifted his feet obediently to step out of his pant legs, and as each foot landed back on the cold stone floor, Castiel kissed the little indentions on the back side of his hipbones.

Cas stood to take Dean’s hands off the wall and found that they were still in place, but curled in fists, and there were clear claw marks raked through the fog on the window panes. No longer the handprints of a human but of some savage. He took Dean’s hands in his own and turned him around, prying his fingers open one by one.

Dean’s eyes were burning again, and Castiel wondered how he’d ever thought this man would kill him. Castiel’s eyes slid reluctantly from Dean’s face, to the weapons by the window. The dagger. The one he thought he’d have in his back, the one he’d been prepared to welcome into his body. And now he only wanted Dean. Wanted him in aching, intimate ways. 

Dean put his hands on Castiel’s shoulders and pushed backwards, towards the bed, demanding his attention again, pulling at the tight sleeves of his suit, but Cas locked his knees and caught Dean’s hands again.

“You have terrible guest etiquette, Dean.” His voice was lower than it had ever been. He flipped them around in the lithe way he was taught to reposition himself in his favor when fighting an opponent. He pulled Dean’s cotton shirt up and Dean raised his arms willingly. Castiel planted a kiss right in the center of his sternum as he let the shirt fall in a heap of Dean’s other articles. Through the flesh of his lips, he felt Dean’s heart pounding, visibly moving in his chest. 

As soon as Dean’s knees were against the bed, Castiel pushed him and Dean fell back with ease, losing his breath and fluttering his eyelids on impact. Castiel saw Dean’s hardness through the one layer of clothing he still wore, and he tried not to lose his resolve.  
Dean followed his gaze and breathed Castiel’s name with want, his hands grabbing and twisting sections of the white bedspread, now touched.

Castiel lost his direction, lost his train of thought, leaned into Dean’s warm skin, and melted. Slowly descending, slowly crumbling, until he was folded over Dean, and breathing in the raw scent of his skin. Dean encircled him in his arms, as if he knew that Cas was overwhelmed, and just held on. 

Castiel moved his lips against Dean’s flushed, warm skin, and it wasn’t quite a coherent sentence and it wasn’t quite a kiss. And they went on like this, in a comfortable silence without vultures and lies and secrets. He listened to Dean’s pounding heartbeat, and waited for it to slow, but his own never did.

When Castiel stood back up, Dean’s eyes were closed and he took deep breaths and slow swallows before opening them again. He nodded at Cas, who slid his hands over the elastic waistband of Dean’s under garment before slipping his hands under and pulling them down Dean’s legs to join the rest of his clothes. Castiel kept his eyes on his own hands, the whole way down, and he felt like he could see something thrumming inside his hands that didn’t belong to him, and he didn’t want it to touch Dean. He stood back and wrung his hands together, and finally looked up at the man laid out on the white bed.

Dean belonged with the golden people, the ones who lived in harmony with the gods, the ones whom the gods envied for their beauty and virtue. He tilted his head back on the bed in a gesture of impatience and Cas could see the flush of red, faint in the moonlight, that covered all of the pale, vulnerable skin on his neck and chest. Dean’s body was thicker than his own, and softer. He had more muscle and more substance, and more variation in color. Scattered patches of freckles coloring the tops of his shoulders and the dip at the base of his throat and the bridge of his nose. Pale peach on the parts that weren’t often touched by sun. The hair on his body was sparse and fine, lighter than the deep sandy color on his head. It glinted like gold thread in the silver-dipped moonlight. The only part of Dean’s body without defined muscle through skin was just around his belly button. Castiel also noticed shiny pink scar tissue, at just the right angle, across the top of his right thigh, on the inside of his forearm, a long gash across his chest. All of it was Dean, and all of it made Castiel’s knees significantly less sturdy. He watched Dean’s visible heart, and counted with it, five fast seconds. Dean’s eyes had fallen to Castiel’s fidgeting hands, and there was apprehension in his moonlit eyes.

“Cas, you’re…” Dean’s sentence choked off, and Castiel knew it was the silence that stole it from his throat. He tried again. “You’re shaking. Come here. We don’t have to.”

Castiel shook his head. “No, I want to. I want you. It’s just…” he looked down at his hands again, accusingly, and held them out, away from himself, like dirty rags.

Dean started to sit up, leaning on his elbows. He looked at Castiel’s hands, and then all the way down his body. His face was lit, and Castiel could imagine his own being shrouded in darkness, and hideous.

“You’re an angel, you know that?” Dean said. "If I ever saw one, it's you."

Castiel’s head shot up, and tilted to the side in confusion.

“Terrifying and b- ” he swallowed, and took a breath, “beautiful.”

Then, finally, Castiel put his hands face-down on Dean’s thighs and dropped to his knees again. He’d wind the hideousness up in his chest, just for now. He could hold it, long enough to touch Dean, tight enough to keep it out of his fingertips, off of his tongue. To give him what he wanted to so badly. Dean’s head lifted to watch Cas as he straightened out one leg and made his way, in soft wet kisses and nips, up Dean’s calf and thigh, into the dip where his leg met his hips, where golden downy hair grew in patterns that suggested where to kiss next. Castiel ignored it, going back down and straightening the other leg. He repeated himself, this time listening to the tiny gasps, paying attention to wear his mouth was when Dean’s spine curled, pushing his hips upwards.

“Cas,” he gasped again, when his lips met the inside of Dean’s knee. He lingered there for a while, his tongue playing at the blue, vulnerable vein that throbbed just beneath the swell of Dean’s thigh, and earned a quiet moan. After the nervousness left him, Castiel slowed down and took note of every inch of Dean’s skin. He touched it all with his hands or mouth or the tip of his nose, or his tongue. When Dean gave a different reaction, like in the valley between Dean’s stomach and ribs, Castiel took his time touching it in different ways with different pressures. With just the tickle of his breath, Dean was panting. When he used his teeth, biting just below Dean’s nipple, he watched as Dean’s jaw clenched and he pressed his shoulders into the mattress, raising his chest higher.

The noises of Dean’s mouth and of Castiel’s mouth _on_ Dean filled the room, and it was somehow still so quiet.

Castiel climbed onto the bed on his knees and leaned over Dean, still working his way around his body. When he closed his mouth over one of Dean’s nipples, pink and raised in the chilled night air, Dean’s exhale became far more vocal. To that point, Dean had kept his hands on the bed, clenching and unclenching occasionally. But now, they nearly startled Castiel with how quickly they found their way into his hair, twisting and combing, sending electricity through his body. He looked up at Dean, unwilling to miss whatever expression he would find on his face, and saw him with his eyes closed tightly, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth.

Castiel lunged forward and swung one leg to the other side of Dean, straddling him, and connected their mouths with urgency. Dean crushed him down, as close as he could get, but there wasn’t enough contact. Castiel was still fully suited, but his will –as it did with Dean– was crumbling. He tried to slow Dean down with his kisses, opening and running his tongue along the ridged palette at the roof of Dean’s mouth, but Dean was relentless, using his body instead, rolling his hips up into Castiel’s and complaining at the contact of his bare skin to the thick, synthetic fabric of Castiel’s suit. Castiel could feel the pressure of Dean between his legs and it was not enough. He stumbled backwards, off of Dean, onto the floor, and pressed the button on his collar that depressurized his suit. The slipping sound it made against his skin as it slid effortlessly from his body didn’t belong in the quiet of this room, with Dean’s breaths and his breaths, sharing space. Just as the thrumming in his hands didn’t belong in this room, all over Dean’s skin. It belonged in a tower in Aether, one that no longer stood. It belonged at the bottom of a smoldering pile of steel and concrete, many miles from here.

He stepped out of the suit, fully naked beneath it, his cock curving up, and looked up at Dean, whose eyes had been trained on him all along. He couldn’t understand the expression on Dean’s face, but it was different than any expression he’d seen so far, and his eyes were glassy and the moon was in them, brighter than the one he would have seen if he turned around and looked out the window.

“You ruined me,” Dean said, and his voice was devastated, burned Castiel’s ears like the dark amber drink Dean liked. Castiel nodded in agreement, and, slowly, one inch at a time, climbed back across the bed towards Dean, his head bowed low. The closer he got, the more his own shadow darkened Dean’s brightness, and something about this bothered him, so he lowered himself, his chin sliding up Dean’s thighs.

“You saved me,” Dean said, and this time, the last syllable was cut short by his own shock. Not a gasp, but as if his lungs constricted and everything was forced out. Castiel smiled around the place where his lips had landed, because he’d gotten the best reaction yet by planting a kiss on Dean’s cock, where the head met the foreskin. Dean’s hands fluttered around, trying not to reach for Cas again as he laid more kisses around the tip and along the thick vein on the underside. Castiel reached up and caught one of Dean’s frantic hands with his own and they locked fingers and eyes as Castiel took all of Dean into his mouth and came back up the length of him with tight lips and a wandering, curious tongue. 

Dean’s voice was obscene, sputtering out breaths and moans and jumbled syllables, all quiet and muffled by his own closed lips. He thrashed, and his legs opened, and his toes curled. He took deep breaths in and let them out with a shudder, closing his eyes and throwing his head into the pillow.

Castiel was keeping himself from making contact with Dean’s skin, so that he still had an ounce of control in the situation, but Dean pulled on his hands, trying to get the rest of Castiel’s body within reach.

“Cas… I wanna touch you,” Dean whispered, still pulling, so urgent.

“Wait, I just – ” Castiel complied, and went to Dean but held his hands tightly away from their target, wrapped up above Dean’s head, like the little statue of the selfless man on the crucifix that sat on the bookshelf in Dean’s cabin. He put his other hand over Dean’s mouth, petting his lips, trying not to get swept away in another kiss, and gathered his words.

“I just wanted to tell you… I just wanted you to know, I wanted every inch of you to know,” he started, and the words were there on his tongue, but he was afraid that they would come in the wrong order, or too quickly. He felt like a mountain that could not hold its grief, an avalanche or a volcano, and Dean was underneath him, and he would be buried in it all. The silence kept down. There was a reason for the silence. “That you are good. You are my righteous man,” Cas whispered, pacing himself carefully, needing not raise his voice any higher to be heard over Dean’s fluttering breath. He felt the burning at the root of his nose and the stinging in the corners of his eyes. He lifted one of Dean’s palms to his mouth and placed a long, adoring kiss there. “Even to a place you hate, a place you have every reason to hate. I heard your voice Dean… I heard. I was there at the generator, and I… Even with so much loathing in your voice,” Castiel was beginning to stumble on his words, his inhales catching in his throat, his breath puffing into Dean’s other palm as he kissed it, too. The ashes were coming up, and Dean was there, being covered. “You risked your life to save strangers. Bad strangers. Corrupt strangers. You could have… died. Saving someone like me, Dean. Because you are good and light and I just need you to know… I just need you…” Castiel cut his own sentence off with a messy kiss, and it was salty and their cheeks were slipping with moisture that could have been from either of them. 

Castiel’s mouth wasn’t fitting quite right with Dean’s, contorted to keep everything in, his lips pressed tightly together. His teeth were clenched even as his mouth moved stiffly against Dean’s, and he tried so hard to hold back the ashes, but they came burning up through his throat, and he hid himself against Dean’s neck and sobbed, just once. A painful sob that he felt in his gut, in his tense muscles, and he struggled to pull air back into his lungs.

“I need you too,” Dean said, like it was the hardest thing he’d ever said, like it caused him physical pain to say it, and he wrote it into Castiel’s skin in delicate circles and bore it into Castiel’s eyes with the green that always came with life and renewal and sun. Silence followed, and it was more than enough. Castiel rolled himself so that his body was flush against Dean’s, all of it. And it was like a fuse, untouched, being lit for the first time, sparking and sputtering under the flame of a match.

Castiel had bouts of desperation, when he slotted his hips against Dean’s in forceful thrusts, chasing a teasing, coiled warmth somewhere in his core. And he finally understood the noises Dean had been making, because his were far louder. 

He reached between them and wrapped Dean’s cock and his own in his fingers, unsteady and unpracticed, still gauging Dean’s reactions to pressure and placement and pace, but losing focus easily. Their skin was soft in Castiel’s hands, but thick and heavy, silky and pliable around their hardness. When he felt Dean’s fingernails digging into the skin of his back, or raking down his spine, when he saw Dean’s mouth fall open or his brows knit together, he would slow himself, and resist Dean’s movement. Dean arched his back and Cas watched the tendons of his throat raise and quiver like arrows poised to fly, and when his mouth fell open, Castiel would catch the sound coming out against his own lips, and he would smooth the sheen of sweat on Dean’s temples out with his free hand, feeling every muscle of his against Dean’s, tensing and vibrating with need.

Dean was a fast learner, though, realizing he was being tampered with. He lulled Cas into a slow rhythm with a deep kiss, one hand twirling around Castiel’s scalp, and the other with a long, lingering caress between his shoulder blades, pressing his fingertips into each vertebrae of Castiel’s spine, massaging into the dips between them. When he made it to the last notch, he slipped one of his strong, golden fingers down further and circled it around his tight-muscled entrance, pressing slightly and drawing back a few times.  
He’d been playing with fire, after all.

Castiel nodded rabidly, frantically, knowing Dean’s probing fingers were waiting for permission.

And the fuse, now touched, writhed on the bedspread, now touched, and the nerve endings in his body felt as though they were convulsing at the surface of every part of him. Castiel’s throat was raw as he cried out, feeling every bit like Prometheus’ clay figure, molded by golden fingers and worshipping their god in rapture. 

He shoved himself down onto Dean’s fingers, and gripped his biceps, biting into the hard swell of Dean’s chest and whimpering. He felt Dean’s open mouth against his forehead, and he reached his neck up to meet it, letting Dean’s tongue slip inside his mouth and render him entirely mindless.

He surrendered. He surrendered to Dean and to whatever forces he’d questioned walking into this room, that this was the place where they came together. Eventually, he felt Dean surrender too, on the precipice of his orgasm, when his hands stopped exploring and just wrapped Castiel tightly in his arms and buried his nose in the dip between Cas’ neck and shoulder, his mouth speaking nonsense (something that sounded like ‘son of a bitch’) into Cas’ throat.

Cas cupped Dean’s jaw in his hand and lifted it, not wanting to miss the very best reaction. Dean opened his eyes, still wet and shining at the corners, and looked through Castiel, through the glass wall, through the moon itself, and into oblivion. His mouth opened wide, but nothing came out. Castiel put his fingers on Dean’s lips, and hooked them just enough to feel the heat and moisture on his tongue, and Dean’s breath shuddered, and stuttered, and stopped altogether as Cas felt warmth on the hand that still moved between them. His eyes squeezed shut and the moisture that had been threatening to spill fell in one perfect bead, rolling over the swell of his cheekbone and into the shell of his ear.

Castiel watched this all in awe, a stunned awe, and Dean’s beautiful expressions and beautiful sounds, that finally, finally scared away the silence, were like hands. Like thrumming hands, that reached into Castiel’s body at the tense and coiling warmth and twirled its long, strong fingers and something sleeping there stirred and shattered, the warmth and the rapture out and into every one of Cas’ extremities.

Castiel came, a long, low, suffering sound, vocal where Dean had been silent. He sobbed out, whimpered, moaned, as if his voice could have hands too, and sweep away all the silence and all the hurt that seeped into every opening in their lives, immobilizing them, like grout. He stilled his hips completely and then slid, so slow he nearly stopped, against Dean, the rest of his body taut, reaching for purchase of anything, his inexperience apparent in his fumbling hands. He shivered violently through the last of his orgasm, and replaced his fingers on Dean’s lips with his own as he nearly lost consciousness, his eyes closing at the last moment, seeing the moon inside a perfect green night behind his eyelids.

There was no collapse or lurching finish. Just a very gradual slowing of hips and hands and mouths until the movement stopped altogether, and the two of them lay tangled on the white bed in the silver light, with their defenses discarded on the floor.

It seemed like an appropriate time to say something. But _something_ wasn’t good enough. The moment was comfortably quiet, not suffocating. Tiny little sounds, everywhere. The slow in and out of their lungs like a tide, the occasional groan of a ceiling beam, the wind sliding over the window panes like a whisper, and the barely-there hum of the generator below them. There were a million tiny sounds, Castiel realized, that made up this big silence.

He fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep when Dean began humming, out-of-tune and varying volume, feeling calloused, wicked fingers tracing soothing patterns into the side of his neck and the muscle on the top of his thigh, which was thrown loosely over Dean’s waist. The night was still dark, but there was a dull grey darkness that wasn’t quite as dark as the rest, that hovered in the east, promising another day. Castiel hated it, and the uncertainty it would bring.

As he slipped out of awareness, his last thought was a vague and fuzzy one about the inevitability of the big bed with the white sheets and the glass wall on the eleventh floor, not in the city, and not in the valley, where the two sides of the world with irreconcilable differences came together. Where they broke down and unwound their differences, like thread. Where they drug miles and miles of the stuff around behind them, as it crossed and recrossed but never touched. What might they have mended, sewn back up, with their trails of thread, while they traipsed around destroying things and each other?

And had they, on this night, tied knots in the thread? Tangled it so much with their writhing bodies that the two threads could never venture away again? Or had they undone the great seam that history had made and now the earth would quake and gape and divide, leaving a crevasse where all lovers and liars like them would fall in?


End file.
